


The Field

by cassandramortmain



Series: Dispatches from the Refrigerator [3]
Category: Misfits (TV 2009)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Romance, Slow Burn, Time Travel Fix-It, discussion of suicidal thoughts, offscreen sexual violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-13 17:33:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 38,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29157429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassandramortmain/pseuds/cassandramortmain
Summary: Alisha climbs out of the freezer. Or: How Alisha becomes a private detective and the ASBO Five becomes the Sisterhood of the Traveling Immortality.
Relationships: Simon Bellamy/Alisha Daniels
Series: Dispatches from the Refrigerator [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2067915
Comments: 21
Kudos: 9





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So here is the end of this little Simon/Alisha trilogy! Each part can be read either with the others or alone. Thanks to everyone who's read along. This fic is complete and a new chapter will be posted once a day. The epigraph and title are from "The Field" by Dave Malloy.

_Beyond right and wrong, there is a field. I will meet you there._

*

The way that Alisha becomes immortal is by successfully throwing a peanut into a shot glass at 3:42 AM on a Wednesday morning.

“Suck my dick!” she crows.

“Fuck’s sake,” says Seth, who made the profound error of betting against the Queen of Wertham Drinking Games after six shots of vodka, and sighs. “All right, which power d’you want?”

Twenty minutes later, weaving gently, Alisha slips into bed next to Simon. “I’m going to live forever,” she informs him.

“That’s nice,” he says, mostly asleep. “There’s water and paracetamol on the side table.”

When she wakes up three hours later to go to community service, Alisha has forgotten everything about the night before in the wake of a vicious hangover. She won’t even remember she’s immortal until after she gets her throat slit by a ghost.

*

Two and a half days after she dies, Alisha wakes up feeling profoundly hungover, with a horrible smell in her nostrils.

“Oh no,” she says, when she opens her eyes. “I’ve done a Nathan, haven’t I?”

“Maybe you want to try a shower, mate,” says Kelly, on whose couch Alisha is lying. Kelly looks unusually haggard. Curtis, next to her, is grinning at Alisha with relief, while Rudy tries to look disdainful and the Other Rudy weeps gently in the corner.

 _It’s nice to be missed_ , Alisha thinks, and goes to shower off what appears to be half a cemetery’s worth of dirt, and all of it in her hair. At least she didn’t shit herself.

She comes out twenty minutes later as clean as she thinks she’s going to get and wearing one of Kelly’s tracksuits — not her favorite look ever — to find Seth standing hangdog in the corner of the living room while Kelly whispers viciously at him and Curtis glares. Alisha clears her throat and flashes Seth her queen bitch smile.

“Cheers for the immortality and all,” she says, “but you couldn’t have told everyone I had it before they finished burying me? I’ve got grave dirt in places it’s never going to come out of.”

“Yeah, that’s not the only thing he let us do before he told us,” says Kelly darkly.

“We said we were going to work up to that,” Curtis says, like a warning. “Let her eat something first at least. Rudy’s gone to get a Chinese,” he adds, turning to Alisha.

“Oh god, I’m fucking starving, could you order me an extra egg roll?” says Alisha. “And where’s Simon?”

Curtis swallows. Kelly’s glare at Seth intensifies.

Seth throws up his hands. “You told me I shouldn’t change history!” he says. “This is history, I remember it! I was there for bits of it! I couldn’t change it!”

“There’s a difference between not killing Hitler and letting your friends off themselves!” Kelly snaps.

“You said it was romantic!” Seth cries.

“In a dark fucking way, man,” Curtis says. “Really dark.”

Alisha feels cold. Nearly as cold as when she was dead. “One of you better tell me what’s going on,” she says. “Right now. Where’s Simon?”

Kelly shakes her head. Crosses her arms, lips tight. Seth won’t look at any of them.

Curtis is the one who comes over to Alisha and takes her hands in his. “Alisha,” he says, “Simon’s gone back in time.”

*

She’s grieved for Simon before. But that time she wasn’t so angry with him. And it was different, because he was also standing right there in front of her the whole time.

He told her wasn’t going to go back. He made a _promise_. How could he do this to her?

“He thought you were dead, mate,” Kelly says. “We all did. Seth didn’t tell us you won that power off him until a whole day after Simon left. We weren’t sure we’d get you out of the ground before you woke up.” 

“Yeah, you all thought I was dead, but you didn’t all head off to die,” Alisha says. “He knows what that did to me. I can’t believe he’s making me live through it again. I can’t believe he’d just give up like that.”

“Well, he was always a bit of a nutter, wasn’t he,” says Rudy philosophically, and then Alisha has to hit him until he apologizes.

What she has to accept is that Simon going back means that he’s already dead. There’s nothing she can do about that. There are no more time travel powers left. 

He died months in the past, and she has to learn to live with that. She can’t just let her grief swallow up her whole life. Simon did that, and it was a terrible thing to do. She has to find a way to move forward.

Alisha spends a day repeating this speech to herself in her head. She has a little trouble believing it. 

She locks herself up in the flat. She tries to work out if she should tell Simon’s family what happened to him or not. No one told her family she was dead, thank fuck, so she doesn’t have to do any clean up there, but what about his little sister? She tries to work out how long it will be before somebody reports him missing, and what she should do when it happens. She cries a lot, and then she gets angry at herself, because she thought she already cried all the tears she had to cry over this death.

She looks at the Vegas picture. The old one, the first one, the one he left behind with her the first time he died. There was a new version, one they took together, but Simon took it with him when he left.

He didn’t even try to fix the loop. He didn’t try to change things so neither of them died. She would have tried, for him. If she could have.

It’s not right. It’s ridiculous that she should just let him be dead, and for such a stupid reason, too. What’s the point of time travel existing in the world if it can’t stop a thing like this from happening?

It’s while she’s still thinking this that Seth knocks at her door. “Funny thing,” he says, “but I’ve just had the oddest conversation with you.”

“I haven’t seen you all day,” Alisha says.

“Different you,” Seth says. “How would you like to change history?”

*

Alisha walks back through time, and she lets herself back into the flat. 

It’s the flat the way it was before she moved in: much worse lighting and no privacy curtains anywhere, those terrible clocks on the wall. A boy’s flat. The last clock is counting down from three hours.

Simon’s stashed himself in a corner somewhere, but he must have heard her opening the door, because suddenly he’s hurrying around the barrier of the lift. “Did you forget something?” he asks her, smiling at her the way he always did when he was her future boy: only halfway. Always so fucking sad, and he would never tell her why.

Then he looks at her, and realizes, and his face changes.

“Hi,” she says.

For a moment he is very still.

Then he falls onto his knees in front of her. He buries his face against her. He weeps. She puts her hands on his head.

“You were dead,” he says, sobbing helplessly against her stomach. “I saw you, I saw it happen, you were dead.”

“I can’t believe you did this to me,” she says. “I trusted you.”

*

She hustles Simon over to Seth’s, and he follows her meekly. 

“I’ve got immortality,” she tells Seth. “I need you to take it out of me and put it into him. Also,” she adds as an afterthought, “that’s a terrible fucking grill.” Thank fuck he dropped it before Kelly took up with him.

He charges them a thousand pounds for his services, and she makes Simon pay. He’s still got his mysterious reserves of wealth like he did when he was from the future, and which he would never tell her about when she was in the present. 

Now that she’s in the past, she asks him again.

“Oh,” he says. “Stocks.” 

She looks incredulous at him, and he gets defensive. “I’ve been planning to come back for a while,” he says. “I did some research so I’d know what to invest in when I got here and then I wouldn’t have to worry about money.”

“Yeah, you shouldn’t have been planning to come back at all,” she says, “you prick.”

She really thought he did something a lot cooler to get all that money. Like rob a bank or something.

“All right,” she says, when Seth’s made the transfer like she asked. “You can go die now. I’ll be waiting for you.”

Simon bows his head. “I don’t want to do that to you,” he says.

“You should have thought of that before, shouldn’t you?” she says. “Look, I’m keeping your fucking loop the same, all right, because Seth wouldn’t do this if I didn’t promise to. So just go do it.”

He does what she tells him to. Like he always does. Except for this one time, when he absolutely did not.

*

After the other her burns his body, Alisha goes back to the warehouse and sits next to the remains to wait.

It’s bad. Watching him die is still the worst thing that ever happened to her. But watching his body afterwards is a pretty close second. His face isn’t recognizable anymore, and his limbs are all twisted up. The smell is the same as she remembers, which is also terrible. 

It takes a few days for him to wake up. The way it took a long time for her to wake up, and a long time for Nathan the first time he died. Judging from Nathan the wait gets shorter the more often you use your power, but Alisha doesn’t plan on either one of them using it often enough to find out. 

A few days is plenty of time for her to think about what will happen if the transfer didn’t work just right. Or if burning a body after it’s been shot is too much for immortality to overcome.

She buys bad carryout and totes it over to the warehouse and eats while she watches his body. She naps fitfully, has nightmares, wakes up and watches his body.

On the third day, he wakes up. 

*

They can’t go forward in time because this power only works one way. And they can’t go back to the flat because the other Alisha will be holed up there by now, sobbing. So Simon pays for a hotel room, and then they’re barely inside before she’s shoving him against the door, kissing him hard. Rips her mouth away from him long enough to say, “How could you do this to me?” and then kisses him again, messy and aggressive.

“Alisha,” he gasps, and mouths at her jaw, her neck. 

Her body is buzzing with nerves and fatigue and grief and him. She’s more tired than she can ever remember being and she’s never wanted anyone so badly in her life. She’s never been so angry with anyone in her life.

“Fuck you,” she says. Shoves him to the bed, climbs onto his lap.

“Yeah,” he says, hands fisting in her hair, kissing her collarbone.

“You did this to me, you did this to me,” she says feverishly, hiking up her skirt, pulling aside her knickers. “You knew what this would do to me and you did it anyway.” 

“I missed you so much,” he says, undoing his trousers. “Every day.”

“I was right there,” she says. “I was right there and you did this to me and I fucking hate you for it,” and she pulls him inside of her. 

He cries out. Cradles her face in his hands. “I love you,” he says. “I couldn’t — I couldn’t —”

“The worst thing I ever saw,” she gasps, driving herself desperately down on him. “You did that to me. You let me think it was to save my life but it was for you this whole time. You ruined me. You ruined my life.”

He is ripping at her shirt to get to the skin below, mouth hot against the tops of her breasts, hands clutching at her waist, her back. 

“Oh, I thought you were dead, I thought you were gone,” he says, moaning it into her skin. “I couldn’t — Alisha — not without you —”

“You should have.” She is fucking herself onto him now in furious little jerks. “You should have found a way. You promised me you wouldn’t go back and you did and you didn’t even try to change anything. Fuck you.”

“Yes, yeah,” he says. One hand works its way through the mess of her skirt and panties to find her clit and he rubs with just enough pressure, and the other tangles in her hair, thumb on her cheekbone, cradling her face. He knows her so well now. It makes her so angry.

She comes glaring at him, hard and fast and furious, and he follows after with his eyes desperate on her face.

Afterwards, they lie on the hotel linens, which are nicer than any of the sheets they ever had in their flat, and he plays with her hair like he usually does. But they don’t talk the way they usually do.

“It’s not something you can ever forgive,” he says after a long while. “Is it?”

She stares straight up at the ceiling. “I don’t know,” she says. “Not for a long time, anyway.”

She can hear him swallow. Then he says, “All right. So what do you want to happen now?”


	2. Chapter 2

They move off the estate. They get a new flat, one with two bedrooms. They sleep separately. 

They don’t see anyone they know. They can’t, until they’ve caught back up to the day they left.

Alisha gets a job at a different bar. Bartending is still boring as fuck. She doesn’t make friends with anyone else who works there.

Simon tells her he’s going out job searching during the day. But after a week goes by and he comes back with no new leads every single day, Alisha uses her power on him and finds that he’s nowhere near a job application. He’s back on their old estate, standing on a rooftop, and he’s watching the other him and the other her in the last days of their first round of community service.

The other him has his jumpsuit done all the way up and his shoulders up by his ears, and he won’t make direct eye contact with the other her. The other her is tossing her hair around and smiling at him in a way that makes Alisha itch to see, even secondhand: earnestly, with a little tinge of yearning. He broke her heart and now she thinks he’ll fix it.

God, Simon really was an absolute nightmare to try to flirt with.

She doesn’t say anything to him that night. But the next day she drives to the estate — carefully, on back roads — and goes up to the rooftop where she saw him the day before. 

He’s still standing there, watching the other them. When he sees her he looks down at the tar of the rooftop, a little ashamed, but he doesn’t look surprised. 

She doesn’t say anything to him. Goes to the edge of the roof and sits cross legged on the tar and takes a look for herself. 

They’re cleaning up graffiti today. The other her is standing next to Kelly and talking as she swipes half-heartedly at the paint, and the other him is listening intently while Nathan carries on about something that is probably disgusting, scrubbing with great industry. But the other her keeps flicking her hair back and sneaking glances at the other him in between sentences. Alisha remembers thinking she was being subtle but she’s not, really; it’s a wonder none of the others ever caught on.

The him who went back sits down next to her without a word.

“The only thing I wanted that day was for you to look at me,” she says.

“I was,” he says. “I always was. I was trying to be discreet.” 

For someone that socially awkward he actually did a much better job of being discreet than she did. Before he went back, she would have told him so. She would have laughed when she said it, and watched his face go pleased and pink, and then she would have kissed him.

But he did go back. So instead of doing any of that, she says, “You know you can’t keep doing this. Watching us.”

He looks down at his hands. “It’s not easy for me, you know,” he says.

She stares at him. That fucking self-pity. “I’m sorry, is this supposed to be easy for me? Because someone forgot to tell me so if that’s what’s going on.”

“No, I didn’t mean, I just —” He stumbles over his words, stops, takes a breath. Then: “There’s never been anything else in my life that was good. Just you. So it’s hard for me … to find a way now.”

“Don’t give me this shit,” she says. “You’ve got friends. You’ve got a family. You’ve got superpowers. There are plenty of good things in your life.”

“Yes,” he says, “but you’re what I’ve been living for.”

On the street, the other her has drifted over to where the other him is still standing with Nathan. Judging from her posture she is saying something sarcastic, but she also appears to be triumphant. She’s got the other him looking at her.

“I can’t be that for you anymore,” she says.

*

That night she goes into his room and climbs into his bed. “Don’t say a word,” she says, and fucks him quick and desperate. She cries afterwards, and he wipes away her tears with his thumbs and doesn’t say anything.

*

Simon gets a job at a video editing lab. He gets up in the morning and goes to work in one of his neat little button downs while she’s having a lie in, and gets back around the time she’s leaving for a shift at the bar. When she comes back at the end of the night she usually finds a plate of dinner waiting for her on the table. Simon’s a terrible cook but she’s worse, so she appreciates the thought.

Basically he’s her flatmate. Except sometimes she can’t look at him without crying.

They should just move into separate flats, really. Rip off the plaster, make a clean break of things. But who else are they allowed to see in this time? None of their friends and family can know that they’re here. 

The other them have moved in together by now too, Alisha thinks as the weather turns towards fall, and grinds her teeth.

A few nights before Christmas, the night the other her is selling Seth her old power, when Alisha comes back from the bar Simon’s sitting up in their tiny living room with red eyes. “Sweetheart,” Alisha says, putting her arms around him, and he kisses her desperately. Pushes her back onto the sofa and settles with his shoulders between her legs and licks at her until she screams into a pillow, and then she hauls him up and wraps her legs around his waist and tells him to fuck her as hard as he can.

Afterwards she goes straight to her room and locks the door and doesn’t come out until he’s left for work the next morning. When she gets home from the bar that night he’s locked up in his room, too, and between one thing and another they manage to avoid seeing each other for nearly a week.

*

There’s a bloke at the bar who’s always checking out her tits. Not in a rude leering way, in a friendly appreciative sort of way. And he’s got a nice smile and beautiful arms, and he never screams at the dish washer even though the dish washer’s a complete idiot so Alisha thinks he’s probably not a bad person. 

She lets him buy her a drink after work one night, and then she goes back to his, and then they have nice low pressure sex that should not be emotionally charged at all, except that at the end she starts crying again. Sometimes she thinks she’s cried more this year than she ever has in her life. 

He’s very nice about it, too, which makes it worse.

“We’ve all had messy breakups,” he says, hunting through his flat for tissues and coming up with an assortment of brown takeaway napkins that scratch her face. “It’ll get better.”

He tells her to stay the night, and she ends up making it home the next morning just as Simon is leaving for work. He stands there with his tidy little work bag and looks at her in yesterday’s clothes and ruined makeup and says, “Oh,” and then his hand jerks reflexively up to smooth down his fringe, which she hasn’t seen him do in a really long time. 

She doesn’t shag the bloke from the bar again. 

*

She finds a club and goes dancing. She hasn’t had a chance to go dancing in a while: there was the mess of her power, first, and then after she got rid of it, she didn’t want to leave Simon alone. And he hated clubs unless she got him high first, which was hilarious the few times she talked him into it but not his favorite experience in the world. But Simon’s not her responsibility anymore so why not?

It does make her feel better. Being in a huge seething wave of bodies and heat and music and sweat and letting her exhausted brain switch itself off for a bit. She dances and flirts and lets strange men pay for her drinks, and she walks home barefoot a little after sunrise. 

Simon’s not there, which is confusing at first, but she gets it when he comes in wearing his suit while she’s taking her traditional pre-hangover preventative paracetamol. He’s been out doing his precious parkour training again.

“I didn’t know you were still doing that,” she notes.

“I’ve got used to it,” he says. His eyes rake swiftly over her in her little going out dress, just once, and then he looks away from her and starts the coffee. “Did you have a nice time?”

“Yeah, I did, actually,” she says. “Save me some of that for later,” she adds, nodding to the coffee, and then she walks to her room and shuts the door.

*

She goes out dancing again. She goes out dancing a lot.

She doesn’t make friends at the club, but she does pick up a little gang, a group of people she can get drinks with and leave her bag with and judge everyone else at the club with. They’re all fine, but she doesn’t know if she can trust them to move a dead body for her. She misses Kelly and Curtis. Even Rudy. Even fucking _Nathan_.

She snogs a few blokes, but she doesn’t shag any of them. She doesn’t want to end up crying all her mascara off again, and she can tell that’s still where she is.

Every time she comes home Simon is disappeared deep into his laptop. He’s not quite retreated completely back into himself, he’s still more confident than he was when they first met, but he doesn’t look like the kind of person who has friends. He doesn’t look like the kind of person who wants friends.

*

Once she tries using her power on the other her. As a lark, sort of; to see what it would be like. What it would mean.

The other her is in bed with the other Simon. He looks loose and afterglowy, and the other her is laughing the way she used to laugh when they lay around and talked after sex. She says, “You’re such a fucking liar.”

The other Simon grins and starts to say something, but then suddenly he cuts himself off, looks at the other her more closely. “Are you all right?” he asks.

“What do you mean?” the other her says.

“I don’t know,” he says. “You just looked sad all of a sudden.”

Alisha drops the power and doesn’t try it again.

*

“I think I’m going to leave,” Simon tells her in the spring. The other them are doing their second round of community service now. “After we catch up to the present. I think I’m going to leave London for a while.”

Alisha looks down at the dish she is washing. She washes dishes now, because if she leaves them lying in the sink for too long Simon does them for her and she doesn’t want to owe him that. “All right,” she says. “Where will you go?”

“America, I think,” he says. “I might not be back for a while.”

Alisha rinses her plate and puts it aside to dry. “That’s probably a good idea,” she says.

*

Two days after the other him travels back in time to die, they go to visit Seth, to take the time travel out of Simon and put it in the other her.

“Hiya,” Alisha says. “We’re here to change history.”


	3. Chapter 3

After Simon goes to America, Alisha doesn’t hear from him for weeks. Then she gets an email from him with the subject line “sorry.” It says:

_Hi. Sorry to reach out to you like this. I would leave you alone, but I’m worried about Curtis. I had a vision he turned into a zombie and shot himself._

Alisha shuts her laptop and gets a cup of coffee and makes herself drink the whole thing. Then she goes back to finish reading the email. It still says the same thing.

_I emailed him but I wouldn’t bet on him opening it_ , the email continues. _I talked to Seth and he says he can give Curtis the immortality power when he’s back from Uganda for a bit next week, but I’m not positive the immortality and the zombie powers wouldn’t cancel each other out. Or maybe Curtis would turn into an immortal zombie, which doesn’t sound ideal. I know he’s not happy with you either right now, but do you think you could talk to him?_

_I saw him in a construction site with two dead bodies. One was a girl with dark hair in a blue coat, and the other was a man with fair hair. The girl was bloody around the skull, and I think Curtis bit her. He was talking to Rudy on the phone and said that it was zombie noir, whatever that means._

_Best wishes,  
Simon_

Best fucking wishes. “You twat,” Alisha says out loud. Then she picks up her phone and calls Curtis. 

He sends her straight to voicemail.

“Curtis, it’s me,” she says. “Look, I know you’re just deleting these, but you really should listen to this one and call me back, yeah? I’m worried about you. I think you might be in actual danger. I’m coming to you right now.”

Curtis hasn’t taken her calls since she explained to him what she’d been doing with herself since she went back in time to stop Simon from dying. He listened carefully through the whole thing, and then at the end he said, “And so while you were back there. With immortality, which you knew how to transfer from one person to another. And she was alive. Did you ever think about saving Nikki?”

Alisha stared at him, because she hadn’t, not once. Nikki’s death felt inevitable to her. Like the probation workers, or that guy with the hat who died the first day of their first community service. 

“You should have tried,” Curtis said, and he hasn’t spoken to her since. Or, judging from this email, Simon.

It helps him that he still has community service, but hers is over and done with. His old fame netting him an outsized sentence a second time. So it’s easier for him to avoid her. And anytime she tries to stop by the bar where he still works he won’t look at her.

Now that Kelly’s left the country and Curtis won’t speak to her, the only one of the gang Alisha has left is Rudy. And she does like Rudy, but he’s not the kind of person she’s prepared to build a whole emotional life around. So in a way it’s just the same as it was while they were waiting to catch up with the present. Only now, Simon is gone.

*

When she gets to the community center, Curtis is poking about with his trash picker in a desultory way, and Rudy is sprinting away from the center with great energy. “Can’t stay, mustn’t tarry, it’s the motherfucking ice cream man!” he shouts as he goes by, so she just waves.

“Hi,” Alisha says to Curtis.

Curtis looks her up and down, face stoney, and then turns away, and she cringes. No one gives better disappointed face than he does.

“Look, I know you don’t want to speak to me right now, and it’s fine,” she says, hurrying after her as he walks away. “But there’s something you really need to hear. I think you’re in danger.”

Curtis stops. Rolls his eyes with his whole body. Goes and sits down at the picnic table and gestures for her to go ahead.

“Right,” Curtis says when she’s finished summarizing Simon’s email. “That’s really helpful, thanks. I’ll be sure and avoid any brunettes or blond blokes I see around. Should be easy and make all the difference.”

Alisha takes a turn to roll _her_ eyes at that one, because she doesn’t think this is an appropriate time for sarcasm. “Look, just be careful, yeah? You’re the only one with a zombie power as far as we know, so …” Her voice trails off as she tries to think about what he should be sure to do with it. “Don’t use it unless you have to,” she concludes.

“Yeah, nice one,” Curtis says. “Because you know, until you came around to say that, I was planning on doing a little light raising the dead as soon as I finished picking up this litter.”

“I’m trying to save your life,” Alisha says. “You don’t have to be such a prick about it.”

“Oh yeah?” he says. “Nice to know you care about someone’s life besides yours and your boyfriend’s.”

The only thing she can think of to say to that is, “He’s not my boyfriend anymore.” Which isn’t remotely satisfying.

*

_Thx for telling me, I just went and talked to him,_ she writes back to Simon. _He didn’t love hearing it but at least he knows so that’s better than nothing I suppose?_

*

“He wouldn’t take the immortality off me,” Seth tells her a week later when he comes back to town to pick up Kelly’s things. “I slipped it to him, though. Kelly’d have my head if I didn’t, especially after what happened last time. Told him I was giving him the ability to pick up litter faster.”

*

_What worries me,_ Simon writes her, _is that in my vision, Curtis chose to shoot himself in order to keep the zombie plague from spreading. So he must have come to the conclusion he wasn’t able to prevent himself from feeding and creating new zombies. If he finds himself in the same situation again, and he’s immortal, then what if he comes back still a zombie, still unable to stop himself from feeding, and now unable to die, too? That could turn into apocalypse territory very quickly._

_It’s also possible that the zombie power and the immortality power are antithetical to one another. Which would mean that when he shoots himself he just dies, immortality or not._

_The best case scenario, I suppose, is that if he becomes a zombie and then shoots himself, when the immortality revives him he’ll be human again. Nathan always came back fully healed no matter how much incidental damage he suffered in the interim. But I don’t think it’s possible for us to know for sure which scenario we’ll get before it happens._

Alisha writes back: _It doesn’t matter, because Curtis isn’t going to die, because we’re not letting it happen. In your vision he didn’t have you and me helping him, so that’ll be the difference._

_I suppose I should know better by now than to argue with that,_ is all he sends in response.

They only write each other about Curtis. And zombies, and immortality, and the kind of bullshit technical shit about their powers that has always bored Alisha stiff and that Simon has always vibed wildly for. They don’t write at all about the rest of their lives, the people they’re seeing or the things they’re doing. Alisha doesn’t even know where in America Simon is now. 

_I tried talking to Seth about passing Curtis the time travel and the immortality so he could save Nikki himself,_ Simon says. _But Seth said he definitely would have noticed if that many people showed up at his office passing immortality around like an STI (his words) and he’s not messing with history any more than he already has. Apparently Kelly still gets nightmares about that alternate Nazi timeline._

Alisha still has nightmares about Simon dying, all the time. She has nightmares about herself dying, too. She doesn’t tell him that.

*

Curtis blocks her number and doesn’t contact her. Alisha makes a habit of swinging by the community center every couple days to make sure he’s still not a zombie. Every time he flips her off and refuses to talk to her.

*

A month after Seth gives Curtis immortality, Alisha receives an invitation to Curtis’s funeral.

*

She goes to the community center before the ceremony to visit Rudy’s horrible filthy living quarters and the awful boy he’s staying with so she can find out exactly what happened. Horribly, the awful boy shows signs of wanting to stick around through their conversation and stare at Alisha’s tits, but when she tells him to fuck off he quails and goes.

“It were fucking terrible, dude,” Rudy says, going teary-eyed. “He called me up just before he did it. Said it was zombie noir and there weren’t going to be no happy endings. It hurt me in my heart, like a bad oyster.”

“Right,” Alisha says. “The thing is, we gave him immortality. Slipped it to him in secret. So if he shot himself, then he might be coming back to life.”

“What the fu — and why did no one tell me about this plan?” asks Rudy in outrage. “You can always trust your Uncle Rudy to keep a secret. I would have held it close to my breast and loved it tenderly and passionately each night.” 

“Literally the first day you met Simon you told him about the time we shagged in graphic detail,” Alisha points out. “The point is, Curtis’s family is about to throw him a funeral. And after that, he’s either going to wake up and be a zombie, wake up and be human, or just still be dead. And if it’s the first two, he’ll wake up in his coffin, and I don’t think he’d appreciate that very much.”

“Right, but how do we know which one it is?” Rudy says. 

“We don’t,” Alisha says. “Until he wakes up, or doesn’t.”

*

She thinks it’s mostly a good thing Simon has kept to the boundaries of email since he left, but for Curtis’s sake — and only for Curtis’s sake — she is willing to move to text.

_Hi. I’m at Curtis’s funeral and we’re about to find out which of your theories is right. How long does it take to wake up the first time you come back from the dead? I know it was about three days for both of us but Rudy and I need to know closer to the hour to find out how long we’ve got to dig up Curtis’s body. I don’t want him to wake up underground._

He writes her back almost immediately: _Shit. Hang on, let me talk to Nathan._

Nathan? Well, that’s new. Alisha knows Simon texted back and forth with Nathan a few times after Nathan stayed behind in Las Vegas, but as far as she ever saw that faded away pretty quickly. Nathan’s not exactly the long-distance friendship type.

_Nathan says he was awake in his coffin long enough for his iPod to run out of battery, so at least 10 hours, and then a few more hours after that. We dug him up 78 hours after he died, so call it 65-ish hours for the first revival to take._

God, she really spent months of her life dating the Rain Man. He did have all of those clocks tracking this shit when he went back, she supposes. Then she thinks reflexively, _That prick_ , which is what she thinks every time the idea of him going back occurs to her. _Thx, that helps loads_ , she texts back, and goes to tell Rudy to get their shovels ready for directly after the wake.

*

Curtis wakes up above ground, grumpy and disoriented, but without any immediate cravings for human brains. 

“We’ve got to be safe, though,” he says. “You lot’ll have to lock me up and see what happens when I get hungry.” When he says that he looks right at Alisha without glaring at her, and she feels herself relax inside a little: he’s going to be okay, and so will they.

She and Rudy lock Curtis up in a supply closet in the community center, and then she sends Rudy off to the room he shares with the horrible boy while she watches the door. Rudy’s used to sleeping under these conditions and Alisha knows for a fact she will never be able to. 

“How are you feeling in there?” she calls to Curtis.

“Not craving any brains,” he says.

“D’you want a wet cloth or anything?” Alisha asks. “I could have fucking murdered a shower when I woke up. But I didn’t have a box when I was in the ground, which I suppose was different to you.”

There’s a pause. Then he says, “Yeah, all right,” and she goes to the toilets and dampens down some paper towels and puts them in a bag and passes them under the door to Curtis so he can mop up. 

“Thanks,” he says when he’s finished. “For the towels. And for …”

“Yeah,” she says. “I know. And I’m sorry.”

“I know,” he says, and Alisha sits for a second in the comfortable warmth of being forgiven by one of her best friends.

“So what kind of a terrible twat is that boy Rudy’s staying with?” she asks after a moment. 

Curtis makes a disgusted noise, and they pass a contented hour talking shit about all the worst people they know. 

Eventually, though, Curtis falls silent. Shortly after that Alisha can hear snoring coming through the door. At which point she gives in to temptation and gets out her phone and texts Simon.

_We got Curtis out about half an hour before he woke up so just in the nick. He’s doing fine so far but he asked us to lock him up in case he starts yelling for brains. If he’s still Curtis in the morning we’re going to say it worked and he’s human again._

Immediately she sees the three dots on her screen that means he’s typing. She feels a funny sort of twinge-flutter in her heart at the idea of Simon sitting hunched over his phone, waiting for her to write.

_I’m glad to hear that. I know you can handle yourself but I didn’t love the idea of you and Rudy trying to take down a zombie Curtis just the pair of you. And I was worried about Curtis, too, of course._

_Oh, it wouldn’t have been just the two of us, if it came to that_ , Alisha writes back. _Rudy’s got his own sidekicks now. I’ve only met one of them but I hate him more than anyone I’ve ever met._

_You always hate it when you think someone’s trying to replace you_ , Simon says. Which, in Alisha’s opinion, is a fucked-up thing for him to say to her over text, when she can’t see his face to see how he means it. Is that supposed to be a joke? Or a criticism? Or — ridiculous thought — a suggestion that he is currently attempting to replace her himself? 

It’s impossible to tell. She’s about to write and tell him off, but then those three dots appear again.

_Nathan hates Rudy too, I think for the same reasons. He says if he ever meets him he’ll break his hamstrings, which I don’t think is physically possible._

Nathan again. _You keep mentioning Nathan. Are you two in touch again?_

A long pause. The three dots appear, then disappear. Then reappear again. _I’m staying with him and Marnie for a little while._

“What the fuck,” says Alisha out loud.

_He was actually in prison for a bit. Because of how he tried to cheat the casinos, remember? He’s on parole now and really bitter about it. He says we don’t know how good we had it back home._

Alisha had sort of been picturing Simon doing some sort of technological smart person thing in America, something involving computers or something. Or stocks, since apparently he’s into that now. She supposes him crashing on Nathan’s couch while Nathan natters on about the horrors of American prisons does make slightly more sense.

_So you’re in Las Vegas now?_ she asks.

_Just for a bit,_ he says. _I might go to California soon._

_Las Vegas isn’t really your kind of city,_ she says. Which is mean, probably, because she knows that for Simon Las Vegas means her.

_No_ , is all he says to that.

For a long minute her phone screen is blank. Then: _Nathan Jr.’s growing up really fast, though._ And then he sends her a picture of Marnie’s unfairly adorable baby, practically a toddler now but still with fat baby cheeks, and one wee fist in the air. 

_You’re so fucking mean,_ Alisha writes. _You know I can’t look at that baby without wanting to squeeze him and he’s thousands of miles away now._

_I’ll squeeze him for you,_ Simon says.

*

When Alisha wakes up the next morning, a fully-human Curtis is crouching in front of her. She has fallen asleep curled up on one of the ugly community center couches, her phone still in her hand. 

“Hey,” Curtis says. “Rudy let me out. Looks like I made it.” 

Alisha stretches, trying to work out the kinks left by a night on one of those fucking awful couches. “Good,” she says. “I told you we’d save your life.”

Curtis isn’t looking at her face, so she follows his eyes: oh. He’s looking at her phone. The movement of her stretching has brought it to life, and on the home screen is her text conversation with Simon. 

Alisha flushes and slips the phone in her pocket, where it can’t give her away.

“Lisha,” says Curtis. “You can’t keep on like that. You’ve got to find someone else. Or something else. You’ll make yourself crazy if you don’t.”

“Yeah,” says Alisha. “I know.” Which is at least, she reasons to herself, mostly true. She does know she has to move on. Even if she still hasn’t convinced herself of it.


	4. Chapter 4

When Alisha becomes a private detective, it’s mostly by accident.

A waitress at the bar comes in one night in tears because her little sister’s run away, and the waitress is scared she might have gotten mixed up in the wrong gang. 

“I know some people,” Alisha says. “I’ll make some calls, ask around.” Then she goes out back and uses her power, and she determines that the girl has taken the bus to a Pret a Manger in Chelsea, where she is currently discussing plans to break into Buckingham Palace with a friend.

“That cunt,” says the waitress when Alisha tells her, and Alisha figures that’s the end of that.

But then a few nights later, the bartender she shagged tells her his mate’s girlfriend hasn’t answered her phone in a few days, and asks her can she maybe call around like she did before. Alisha says sure, and twenty minutes later she tells the bartender to tell his mate that his girlfriend is currently fucking a bloke who looks like an egg: completely bald, without even any eyebrows. Then she has to do a little charade of what it looks like when someone that bald fucks a girl and the light reflects off the dome of his scalp. The bartender doesn’t appreciate the charade as much as she feels he should.

It all sort of spirals from there. Whenever someone goes missing, people start coming to her. And a lot of people go missing, especially on the estate. 

At first she does it for free. Then it starts taking up too much of her spare time, so she starts charging for it. People keep coming to her. 

She raises her rates. They keep coming to her.

After a while she quits the bar, goes back to the estate, and opens the Daniels Detective Agency. With a specialty in missing persons, it says on the business cards.

*

“This is proper film noir,” Curtis says approvingly, looking around her tiny office, one flight up from a porn shop and across the street from a curry takeaway. Curtis went through a noir phase after the thing with Lola, even though Alisha thinks it should have put him off noir for life. _Know thy fucking enemy_ , he told her when she said as much. Now he says, “You should put in some of them blinds with the slats. Make it moody.”

“I’m not spending my money on office decor,” Alisha says. “I’m spending it on clothes and vodka and maybe a little coke sometimes. I’m hardly in here anyway.”

*

Alisha finds a missing puppy for a nine-year-old girl. She finds a fifteen-year-old boy who ran away from home to live in his mate’s closet after a row with his mum. She finds a bloke who got taken hostage by a bunch of dealers after his mates couldn’t pay them what they’re owed. She can’t tell them how to get around the dealers, though, and they walk out of her office with blank and despairing eyes. She finds a girl whose boyfriend says he’s looking for her, “just to talk,” but Alisha looks through the girl’s eyes into a mirror to see a bruise standing lividly out on her cheekbone, and she doesn’t tell the boyfriend where the girl is. 

She buys a string of fairy lights and hangs them around the office. She’s there late most nights. 

*

Rudy tells her she’s a fucking legend and he’s got the case of the century for her. He tells her this every week, but Alisha is pretty sure the case has got something to do with his cock. Thus far she has succeeded in preventing him from elaborating further.

Kelly emails her, _Good on ya, mate, it’s about time we all found something worth doing with these bullshit powers_ , and then she talks for a while about how there’s no way to get proper Marmite in Uganda. Alisha mails her a tin.

Nathan doesn’t say anything because why would he? Alisha hasn’t been in touch with Nathan since he stayed behind in Las Vegas and she has no intention of changing that now. 

Simon doesn’t say anything because she’s not in touch with Simon either. She stopped texting him after they dug up Curtis and after she didn’t reply to him twice in a row he stopped trying to text her. 

Curtis was right, Alisha thinks; she can’t go around texting Simon all day and all night too if she ever wants to move on. She can’t keep building her life around the empty place where she used to have him.

It’s not like it was when she and Curtis broke up, where things were awkward for a few weeks but they were able to regroup as friends really quickly. She can’t act like it is. The way she loves Curtis is like the way she loves Kelly: she would kill for him, she knows he would kill for her, and when she looks at him she knows he’s fit — but she doesn’t look at him and think, _home._ She doesn’t need him to belong to her. She doesn’t need him to be only hers. 

She wouldn’t mind shagging Curtis. But she never has detailed fantasies about cuddling him.

Fucking cuddling. She never used to be into it. What Simon reduced her to.

She can’t be Simon’s friend. She never has been. She doesn’t know how to be. She doesn’t really want to be. She wants him too much and she hates him too much and she loves him too much.

*

Now that he’s gone it’s like she has more space to let herself feel it. How angry she is with him. She couldn’t let herself, when they were cooped up in that flat together, or she would have offed one or both of them herself. Since he didn’t quite manage to get the job done on his own, hard as he tried. And look, there she goes again with the rage.

Sometimes Alisha thinks the worst bit is what he did to her memories. 

She used to think it was terrible that she knew Simon was the kind of person who would travel back in time to die for her if he had to, because then she was always worried he was going to do it. But actually there had been something comforting in it, something warm and solid that let her feel safe with him: That was how much he loved her. That was how selfless he was. He would sacrifice himself to make certain she lived a long and happy life. It was part of what let her fall in love with him when he was still that freak in the corner who didn’t know how to make eye contact with her. She knew he had that kind of heroism in him, and that was enough even when he wasn’t, yet.

But him going back the way he did made her realize that when he died, it wasn’t for her. If he actually wanted to save her life, he would have done something to change what Rachel did to her, and he didn’t. He was only planning on saving her so that she’d live long enough to fall in love with him in the present, and then die all over again. 

He died to save the loop. He died to make her love him. He died to manipulate her.

And now all of it — the time he saved her from the mugger; the time he spent over an hour with his head between her legs until she thought her body was going to shake apart from sheer overwhelming pleasure; the time he found her spiralling because her hand slipped on the bus when she still had her old power and a tiny old man tried to force himself on her between stops and she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all her fault until Simon looked her in the eye and told her that it wasn’t — all of it is tainted.

How can she trust any of it now?

*

Alisha does shag Curtis once. It’s nice. 

It’s nice that he’s familiar but not: she knows his body, knows how he likes to be touched, but she’s never really touched him before, except for that one time she tries not to think too hard about. It’s nice that she knows they’re good enough friends that their friendship will survive this, this one stupid drunken encounter that she can feel even while it’s happening they will probably never repeat.

He still looks at himself most of the time they’re shagging, which is still incredibly funny to her. And when she comes he watches her with envy on his face. “Most blokes don’t know what they’re missing,” he says. “But it’s just not the same with a cock.”

Afterwards, they don’t cuddle. Instead, he takes a shower and she smokes a cigarette, which she still likes occasionally, and which Simon could not stand. When Curtis comes out of the shower with a towel wrapped around his waist he rolls his eyes at the cigarette, and she blows a puff of smoke ostentatiously away from him. 

“Do you still miss him?” he asks her.

“Sometimes,” she says.

“Did you think about him just now?”

“Only a little.” Simon’s still the best shag she ever had, which seems unfair. 

Curtis nods, like he expected about as much. “It’ll get better,” he says. “You’re doing really well, though. What you’ve got going with the agency. It’s good. You’re doing a lot of good.”

“He always said we should use our powers to help people,” Alisha says. “But then he also traveled back in time to emotionally manipulate a girl and then kill himself so probably I shouldn’t be taking life advice from him.”

“The agency isn’t about Simon, Alisha,” Curtis says firmly. “Don’t do that. It’s about you. You did this. You made it. You’re helping people. That’s all you. It’s got nothing to do with him.”

It doesn’t but it does. 

It’s true that she didn’t set up the agency for Simon. She didn’t even think about him when she did it. She did it because it was a way to make money that came easily to her, and because when she told someone where to find someone important to them, the look of gratitude on their face was really satisfying. Almost more satisfying than the money.

It’s also true that she set up the agency because it’s something she can do with her new power, and she got her new power because of Simon. 

Not because he advised her to do it or anything. But because of the way he changed her.

Before community service Alisha always took her first impressions of people for the truth. She would look at someone and think: _freak, chav, has-been, gobby little shit_ , and that was that. That would be all she thought of them. She never had any interest in trying to put herself in their shoes, because her own shoes were plenty fabulous and fascinating enough for her.

A little bit into community service, she started to change. She started to actually care about the chav and the has-been. She even tolerated the freak and the gobby little shit.

And then the freak traveled back through time and turned out to be a man she’d fall in love with, and everything changed for her.

It was distablizing. She felt she couldn’t trust her instincts on anyone anymore. What if she dismissed someone the way she dismissed Simon when she first met him, and then they turned out to be amazing? What if no one was someone worth dismissing? 

Alisha started to think that maybe that was right, that maybe she should start taking everyone more seriously. She started to think about everyone she’d ever been mean to, and to feel like shit about it. So when she picked her new power, she wanted it to remind her not to treat people like that again. To show her that people were worth respecting, no matter how weird or freakish they seemed.

That was also why she started the agency. And that was all Simon.

But then it turned out that he traveled back in time not on a noble journey of self-sacrifice but as part of an incredibly selfish quest to fuck them both up as much as possible. So maybe she was right to think he was a freak in the first place. Maybe she was better off as she used to be. Maybe when her future boy showed up, instead of sticking around and letting him change her, she should have run screaming away in the other direction.

She can’t say any of that to Curtis. So instead she says, “When I make enough cash, I’ll hire you away from that bar.”

Curtis is still working at the bar, even though they took him off payroll temporarily when they thought he’d died. He told everyone it was all just a freak accident, a coma that left him with a heart rate so low it was nearly undetectable. 

“I would have been dead,” he repeated over and over again, “except all my athletic training left me with a heart in such incredible condition I can withstand anything.” 

Alisha thinks it’s a testament to her commitment to their friendship that she waited until after his parents left before she started making fun of him for that.

Now he makes a face at her. “I’d never work for you, I know what kind of boss you’d be,” he says. “I’ll sort my own shit out.”

*

Other times Alisha thinks the worst bit is that knowing why Simon went back doesn’t really change all that much for her.

She always knew Simon was the kind of person who would stick his dead girlfriend in a freezer. She knew that before she knew he was the kind of person who would die for her. And she fell in love with him anyway. The same way he fell in love with her knowing she was the kind of person who used her old power on Curtis on purpose and liked it.

And he did go back to die for her, just like she used to think he did. It’s just that he also went back to stick her in the freezer. 

They’re both him. The romantic version of him that swept her off her feet when he first went back and the creepy version she fell in love with later. It’s all him. And she still loves all of him.

He never did believe her when she told him she would fall in love with him in any timeline. So he went back to make certain the one timeline where he knew for sure she did would stay intact. So unbelievably fucking selfish of him. 

When he promised her he’d never go back, he said he would never leave her. And he didn’t, until she told him to.

Alisha still doesn’t have any intention of forgiving him anytime soon. But she understands exactly why he did it. 

*

She goes back to their old flat once, just once. The one that was his first, until he gave her the key.

It’s all still exactly as she left it on the day she followed him back in time. Her silk robe laid out on the bed, his incredibly fucking creepy butterfly box up on the wall. Crumpled tissues from one of her crying jags spilling out of the rubbish bin. The Vegas picture on the kitchen counter.

She takes the silk robe. Leaves everything else and doesn’t come back.


	5. Chapter 5

Nathan and Marnie finally get married. Curtis flies out for the wedding, and so does Kelly, from Uganda.

Alisha doesn’t. Why would she? She’s never been friends with either Nathan or Marnie. She tells them she’s too busy with the agency and sends them some wine glasses. _I’m not replacing these when you break them,_ she writes on the note.

She actually is working on a tricky case these days. This bloke who was given up for adoption as a kid is looking for his bio mum, but whenever Alisha looks through the bio mum’s eyes, all she sees is a window with the same view and the corner of a bookshelf, and sometimes a pair of legs in scrubs moving busily around, with the rest of the body just out of sight. 

It’s some sort of nursing home, she’s pretty sure. But she’s having a fucking time trying to work out which nursing home it is. It might not even be on the estate.

“She’d be pretty young for a nursing home, though,” she tells the bloke when he swings by her office for an update. “Wouldn’t she?” He’s in his twenties, maybe very early thirties. Alisha can’t imagine his bio mum could be much older than fifty. Probably younger. Odds are good she was a teen mum.

He blows his cheeks out. “Who knows,” he says. “Perhaps she’s got some sort of condition that means she can’t live by herself at home. That might even be why she had to give up her kid.” He gazes morosely down, and she notices that his eyelashes are long and feathery. 

And it’s interesting that he says _her kid_ instead of _me_. Like he doesn’t like to think that he’s the kid. Like he doesn’t want to sound vulnerable. 

Alisha learned when she was with Simon that she’s got a bit of a protective streak.

He’s a nice man. Quiet, respectful. He just wants to know where he came from, he said to Alisha when he hired her. His name is Richard.

“I’ll keep looking,” she tells him. “Yeah?” 

*

She gets updates from the wedding.

According to Kelly, the ceremony was too long, Nathan was a dickhead in his vows, Marnie looked like a slag in her dress, and the cake was too dry, but at least they played decent music at the reception. 

According to Curtis, the ceremony lasted a fucking year, Nathan was a prick in his vows, Marnie looked nice, no one remembered to provide Curtis with a dessert that didn’t have dairy, and the music at the reception made his ears bleed.

Both of them have separate sections in their emails about Simon.

Kelly says Simon’s looking fit and he’s doing really well with a job doing editing for some indie studio out in Hollywood. She says he asked about Alisha and was impressed when he heard about the agency but not at all surprised because he always knew she would do something great. She says he came to the wedding with a date but Kelly doesn’t think it’s serious, “and honestly, mate, you don’t need to be able to read minds to see he’s nowhere near as caught up on her as he still is on you.”

Curtis says Simon looks like shit and his job editing ads for American public access telly sounds sad and boring, and he practically got sick in the corner when he heard how well Alisha’s doing without him. He says Simon showed up to the wedding with a pity date that Curtis thinks Nathan set him up with in a pathetic attempt to try to make Alisha jealous, but anyone can see it was meaningless and anyway, the girl has wonky tits.

She has good friends, Alisha thinks.

*

She spends more time looking out of Richard’s bio mum’s eyes. Works out that the window she’s sitting at is facing east, and that there’s a rose garden outside. It’s not a lot to go on, but even so she spends a while driving around the estate past all the nursing homes listed in the phone book, checking to see if any of them have rose gardens on their east sides. None of them do.

_I’m getting really close_ , she texts Richard.

*

She goes online and looks at pictures of the wedding. 

Nathan’s in most of them. He’s wearing a white tux with a tartan kilt for no real reason that Alisha can see, except that it seems to be convenient for flashing people, which he is doing in quite a number of the pictures. And Marnie’s in some kind of retro ’50s white lace number that would look sweet on her if she didn’t have such a porny expression of delight on her face at all the flashing. Alisha is so thankful she was not at this wedding in person, even if means she missed out on Nathan Jr. and his fat little cheeks as the ring bearer.

Curtis and Kelly both showed up well for themselves, though. Kelly’s in this silvery bodycon number that Alisha personally advised her on through Skype, because even though Nathan and Kelly were never properly together Alisha doesn’t believe in showing up to even a quasi-ex’s wedding looking less than your absolute best. It clings to her tits like a fucking dream; Seth can barely drag his eyes away from them in half the photos. And Curtis is in a suit with a flash white scarf wrapped around his neck, which he thought might be too fey but Alisha told him would just look dramatic in person. She was right, like she always is.

There aren’t that many of Simon. He never liked being photographed, always preferred being on the other side of the camera. But in one of the pictures of Nathan, he’s got his arm around Simon. 

Simon’s wearing a sober gray suit that looks — not expensive, exactly, but not cheap, so she supposes he must be doing all right, money-wise. And clearly he’s been keeping up with his parkour, because Kelly was right, he does look fit. 

But what makes Alisha catch her breath is the look on his face. Nathan must have said something right as the shutter clicked, because Simon’s looking over at him with this expression of mingled humor and horror, the one he always used to get when Nathan said anything particularly depraved. Like he’s appalled by what Nathan said, but also so happy he got to hear him say it.

He looks happy, is the thing. Which she hasn’t seen from him in a while. 

Not since he went back. Not since that time in the showers of the community center, right before he went back. Right before she died. 

She didn’t think she’d ever see him look that happy without her.

Alisha finds one picture of Simon with the girl he brought to the wedding. She’s some insipid little blonde, which isn’t even his type, with a button nose and shining white teeth. In the picture she’s laughing, with her head tipped back and her hair cascading over her shoulders, and he’s smiling at her, face pleased and flattered. 

Alisha knows that look. He used to get it every time a girl flirted with him back when they were together, even though he never believed Alisha when she told him girls were flirting with him. He always liked the attention, even if he couldn’t work out how seriously to take it. But Alisha would wager any stake at all that he doesn’t have any real interest in that little blonde outside of feeling flattered that she likes him.

Curtis was right, Alisha notes. The girl has wonky tits.

*

Alisha puts herself in Richard’s bio mum’s shoes right at four and is rewarded by the sight of a tea tray containing cheese on toast, an apple, a biscuit, and a mug of what looks like very weak and milky tea. The mug says “Ivy Vines Rehabilitation Centre,” with a little ivy motif swirling around the handle.

Alisha googles the name and finds a tasteful website for a facility advertising itself as a home for the disabled, just a couple miles off the estate. She calls it up and asks a few questions, and within an hour she’s sending Richard a file with his bio mum’s name and contact information. She was injured twenty-five years ago in an accident, she tells him, and she’s been living at the home ever since. She can talk, though, and she’s interested in talking to Richard.

_I don’t know how I can ever thank you enough_ , he writes back to her. 

_What about dinner?_ she suggests.

Two minutes later, he writes back, _Do you like curry?_

*

Dating Richard is a new experience for Alisha.

He’s a proper adult, for one thing. He’s got a savings account and a Tesco Clubcard and opinions about whiskey. He is working on his relationship with his bio mum, and also careful not to hurt his adoptive mum’s feelings. She’s his best friend, he says, and means it.

The first night she stays over at his flat she looks around for something to bully him over so she has an excuse to tease him — so she can say he needs better light, some artwork, anything that will make her sound above it all and nonchalant — and everything is just so tasteful that all she can come up with is, “It’s like a fucking home magazine in here.” Which is not her best work at all, but he smiles politely anyway, showing a dimple on his chin.

He knows how to carry on a conversation without her having to guide him through it. He’s not all that interested in most of her party stories — “I’m an old man,” he says apologetically, even though he’s only twenty-seven, “and I can still manage a night or two on the town, but I’ve never been much for the recaps, even at my best” — but he’s interested in hearing about her work. How she tracks people down, the things she sees, the clients she works with. 

And she likes hearing him talk about his work, which is being a grammar school maths teacher. Alisha always hated maths but she thinks kids that age are cute, and it’s fun to watch the way he lights up when he talks about them, like a little electric bulb.

The sex is good, which is important. And it’s good straight away, which is another interesting new thing for her. She doesn’t need to train him up, teach him how to touch her and where and when. Because Richard is an adult man who has had plenty of straight adult man sex in the past, and he already knows how women like Alisha like to be touched. 

So when Richard touches her, it’s not like he’s developing some sort of telepathic connection to her body where he knows exactly what she wants before she even knows it. Because he’s got the memories of how other women like to be touched guiding his hands, and because he’s got things that he wants himself. He’s got his own agenda — a _reasonable_ agenda, of _reasonable_ straight adult male desires — and he knows how to go about advancing it.

And he’s willing to be filthy, which Alisha absolutely appreciates. She fucks him against a wall in a greasy alley outside a bar and he’s there for it right away, egging her on, one hand in her knickers and the other in her hair. 

He won’t let her do a schoolgirl role play with him. Says it would get too weird. Fair enough, she figures, and drops it.

But the point is, it’s not all so intense all the time with him. Their shagging can just be shagging, low stakes and fun and maybe meaningless if they feel like it. It doesn’t have to be all about destinies or intertwined fates or whether or not one of them is about to die. Or travel back in time and then die. 

It’s nice, the lack of pressure. The ease of it. The comfort. It’s nice to be able to feel fond of someone and not have to wonder when they’re going to off themselves and tell you they’re doing it for you.

*

He gets on with her friends, mostly. He and Curtis have a polite conversation about accounting, because Curtis is still talking about how he wants to go and work at a bank sometime soon now he’s left his old job at the bar and got a new one at a sports shop, and Curtis comes away looking impressed but a little confused.

“He’s nice,” he tells Alisha. “But I thought you’d want someone with a little more go, after your last. I don’t see this one exactly hitting the clubs, do you?”

“I like that,” she tells him. “That he’s quiet. It’s restful. Simon hated clubs but he was a fucking adrenaline junkie, and now that’s over I finally have time to realize how exhausting he was.”

Curtis still looks skeptical, so she hits him on the arm. “You’d be absolutely miserable at a bank,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says, “I’m starting to work that out.”

Anyway, it’s not that Richard never wants to go to clubs. He’s perfectly capable of getting dressed up for a night out and dancing a little too close with her, and even of doing a line or two of coke if it’s on offer and the night is right. And he doesn’t need her to guide him through any of that, either. It’s just that he doesn’t want to do it _every_ night, and he doesn’t ever want to go quite as hard as she can. 

And fair enough. Alisha’s getting older now, too, and she’s got a business to run. She doesn’t necessarily feel like dancing all night every night either.

Richard tells Alisha he likes Curtis, and it’s a shame about all his potential. He says that word a lot, _potential_ , which she wishes he wouldn’t because it always makes her think of probation workers. But he’s impressed that Curtis is getting his life back together now his community service is over.

“It’s good he has someone like you showing him the way,” he says. Which is another new experience for Alisha. Being considered the responsible role model.

*

Richard meets Rudy, and that one doesn’t go quite so well. Rudy is all broken up about a nun he apparently was involved with who is now dead, and he spends most of the meeting on a long and sobbing speech about how her twat was not musty at all, even though you’d think it would be. Alisha passes him tissues and pats his arm.

“He’s nice enough,” Richard says tactfully afterwards. “But he seems a little immature, don’t you think?”

“Don’t be a condescending prick,” Alisha says. “We’ve been through a lot together.” 

“Powers stuff, you mean?” Richard asks. He knows about the powers, but he doesn’t have one himself. “Be wicked if I did, though,” he said once. “I’d love to teleport.” But that just made Alisha think of Nikki and go quiet.

“Yeah,” Alisha says now, “powers stuff,” and leaves it at that.

*

“Of course he doesn’t understand about the powers, mate,” Kelly tells her. “No one can understand unless they lived it. The lot of us, we’re always going to have that in common, and no one else will ever really get it. No matter how much we might love them.”

Alisha eyes Kelly as closely as she can through a Skype screen. “How’s Seth?” she asks.

Kelly grimaces. “He’s trying,” she says. “He’s trying really hard, and I’m trying not to send him walking over a land mine.”

“Richard’s going to lead a school assembly on land mines,” Alisha says smugly. It’s a boring thing to be proud of, your boyfriend telling a bunch of children about war crimes, but she’s having fun leading her nice boring life right now. 

Kelly raises an eyebrow. “Proper superhero shit, that is,” she says.


	6. Chapter 6

A girl comes into Alisha’s office one day and says, “I’d like you to find the man who raped me.”

Alisha looks at the girl’s eyes, which are flat and level. Then she uses her power and finds the rapist and tells the girl exactly where to go.

“What you do with this is none of my business, yeah,” she tells the girl. “You didn’t hear it from me.”

“Got it,” the girl says, and gets up to go.

Alisha almost doesn’t say anything. But when the girl puts out her hand to turn the doorknob, she can see how skinny her wrist is, how fragile, and before she can stop herself, she says, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“I’m sure,” the girl says.

A week later, the girl is found dead in her own flat.

*

Richard tells Alisha she should go to the police.

“It’s got to be the rapist,” he says.

“No shit it’s the fucking rapist,” she responds.

“So tell the police!” he says. “You know his name, you know his location, and you know she was trying to get revenge against him. It’s open and shut.”

“But I can’t tell them that in a way they’ll believe,” she says, which she kind of can’t believe she has to explain to him. He’s smart, he should get it without her having to walk him through it. “And police never help with this sort of shit anyway.”

“You should at least try,” he says, which is the least helpful thing anyone has ever said, probably.

*

Kelly says, “Tell me where he is and I’ll program a rocket to hit his house,” which Alisha appreciates but is too showy for what she wants.

Curtis says, “Let’s go, we can tie him up like Sam and me did with the coach, tell everyone what he is and let the estate take care of him,” which is better but still not quite right.

Rudy says, “I’ll fucking batter him to death, I’ve got a bat,” and at least his heart is in the right place.

*

She uses her power to check in on him. She uses it a lot. 

He’s in a bar, usually, or a club, or at a party. Looking at girls. Hunting, she thinks.

He’s got a power. It’s similar to her old power, actually, as far as she can tell. She only sees him use it briefly, just for seconds at a time, before he seems to get bored and move on to the next thing. But from what Alisha can tell, when the rapist touches a girl, she stops being able to say no to him.

She remembers what it felt like, to have a power like that. To walk through a crowd of people and know that she could make them all want her with just a touch. The dizzying rush of it, the glee. 

She could get high off it. Did get high off it.

She also remembers what it was like to have that power used on her. Like having her whole self erased.

Alisha thinks she’d better do something soon. She thinks maybe she has to be the one to do it. Because she told the girl where to find him. Because his power is so close to hers. It feels like it’s her responsibility. 

But she’s still not certain exactly what the right thing to do is.

*

She calls Simon, finally, because he strikes her as the best person she can think of to figure out what to do to a murdering rapist at large in the streets. She’s not quite certain if that’s a compliment or not.

He picks up the phone on the first ring, sounding surprised. “Alisha?” he says. “Is everything all right?”

“Hi,” she says, formally. “Listen, I need some help. With a work problem. I need professional advice from you.” 

“I — all right,” he says. “Sure. What do you need?”

He says it … not quite casually, because he always takes her seriously when she talks to him. But she’s pretty sure he doesn’t expect what she’s about to say. 

If she can work out what she’s going to say herself. She can’t figure out how to put it over the phone. 

Finally she blurts out, “I know where there’s a guy who raped and murdered a girl, and I can’t sort out what to do with him.”

There’s a brief pause. Then: “Okay,” he says, very simply. “Start at the beginning.”

So she tells him the whole story, starting with her founding the agency — “I heard about that bit,” he says, “it sounds amazing” — and then moving on to the girl coming to her office and then showing up dead, and then to Alisha finding out about the rapist’s power. 

“Obviously it was the rapist who killed her,” she says. “But I can’t prove it, not to the police. And I don’t know what I should do.”

He’s quiet for a little, as though he’s thinking. Then he says, “Do you want him dead?”

Alisha swallows. “If it happens accidentally, in the middle of a fight or something, I can live with it,” she says. “But I don’t think I want to do it on purpose, no. I haven’t killed anyone in a while, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

“All right,” Simon says. He sounds calm, a little abstracted, the way he gets when he’s thinking through a plan. “You want to make sure he isn’t going to do it again,” he says. “Right?”

“Yeah,” she says. She forgot how much better it always made her feel when he started planning his way through the weird shit that always happened with them. Like she was in a country where she didn’t speak the language and Simon was the only translator around.

“And what else?” he asks.

“I want him to know …” She has to stop and think about it. Then she says, “I want him to know how she felt. Because I knew, when I looked at her. How powerless, how afraid. I want him to feel it, too.”

“All right,” Simon says again. “I think there are a few things we can do.”

*

She goes to the club she likes and talks to a few blokes and finds a guy who’ll sell her ecstasy. She drives herself and her tab over to the community center. Sits on the benches outside and swallows it. Feels her pupils contract and dilate. 

And then her power reverses itself.

So she doesn’t put herself into the rapist’s shoes. She puts him in her shoes instead.

She can feel his mind quivering wildly about as she holds him in her head. Her power doesn’t like being used for long stretches at a time, and he wants to break free, but she’s been practicing a lot lately with all her work, and she’s able to hold him steady. 

She is careful not to look down at herself, to look at nothing reflective, nothing that could give him any clue who she is. She holds him in her mind, and she walks herself, and him in herself, up to the edge of the lake on the estate. Climbs over the railing on the dock and stands poised over the edge, above the filthy water.

“There’d be nothing you could do,” she says out loud, slowly, “if I decided to jump. You’d be coming with me. No matter what. Your mind would drown. You’d be braindead. Your body would be empty.”

His mind thrashes in hers. She holds him fast.

“I can bring you with me,” she tells him, “anytime I want to. You don’t get to control it. There’s nothing you can do. I’m in charge now.”

His mind quails. He’s afraid. Begging her.

“I’ve got an eye on you,” she says. “I’m watching you. If you ever use that power you’ve got again, on anyone — well. I’ll just take you for a little walk, won’t I?”

She pauses, lingering in it, in the moment, in his fear. Then she says, “Put on some fucking gloves, you dickhead,” and she drops him.

*

When she gets back to her flat she’s got three missed calls: one from Richard, two from Simon.

She texts Richard, _Working late, see u tmrw?_ and she calls Simon back.

“Are you all right?” he says when he picks up, instead of hello.

“Yeah,” she says. “Hi.”

“Sorry. Hi,” he says. “Are you all right? Did he see you? Did it work?”

“I’m fine, he didn’t see me, I was careful,” she says. There’s a giddy undercurrent to her voice. She’s maybe feeling the ecstasy a little more than she realized earlier. “It worked really well. He was fucking pissing himself.”

“I knew he would be,” Simon says. His voice is colored with relief, and with something warmer. Pride, maybe. “You’re so scary when you want to be.”

“You just think that because when I got mad you knew it meant you weren’t getting laid,” she says automatically. More familiar than she means to be, than she’s been with him so far in all this, and he huffs out a shocked, breathy laugh.

“No,” he says. “You’re very intimidating, you know.” A little thread of answering familiarity in his voice. Maybe even yearning.

Fuck, she’s still really high. 

“Hey,” she says. “Thank you. For helping me sort this out. I really didn’t know what to do.”

“You would have worked something out,” he says. “And you did all the hard bits, anyway. I just helped you organize things a little.” 

“No, but really,” she insists. “It means a lot. I just couldn’t leave him out there like that, you know? But I didn’t know who else to ask.”

His voice gets very gentle, the way it did all the time when he was from the future. “You can always ask me anything, Alisha,” he says. “You know that.”

That fucking sincerity of his. It’s still overwhelming to her.

“You know what’s really fucked up,” she says abruptly. “The whole thing with his power. It’s a lot like mine was.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” he says. His voice has gone sharp all of the sudden, warning even. Disorienting, the rapid switch.

“It does, though, doesn’t it?” she says. “The sort of thing he does. I’ve done it. I’ve killed people. I’ve raped people.”

“Alisha,” Simon says, very distressed.

“Maybe that’s why I had to do it with my mind,” she muses. “Hold him there. Because we’ve got the same sort of minds.”

“No you don’t,” he says. “You don’t at all.”

“But I’ve done it,” she says. “All the same things.”

“No,” he says. “What happened with you and with Curtis, that was different. You didn’t understand —”

“But I knew that I was getting away with something,” she interrupts. “Using that power. I didn’t know exactly why it was wrong but I did know that it was. That’s part of why it was fun to use it.”

“Yeah,” he says. “And then you stopped using it. You saw that it hurt someone, and that bothered you, so you stopped. And then you never used it again. Whereas he saw that he hurt someone, and he killed her. That’s the difference between you and him.”

Alisha hesitates, wavering. It’s so nice, what he’s saying. She would like it to be true. But she’s not sure.

“I never told you I saw you and Curtis, did I?” Simon says. “When that happened.”

“What? No,” she says. “Wait. Were you doing your little creeper thing in the locker room?”

“I did tell you I was going to be there,” he says, a little testy. “We all worked it out among ourselves that I was going to hide out in the locker room and see who was leaving us those notes. You just weren’t listening when I said it.”

“Well fuck me,” Alisha says, “there was a lot going on back then and the planning part was boring as shit.”

“Anyway,” Simon says, “I saw you there. And I didn’t — well, I didn’t watch, exactly —”

“You dirty little creep,” Alisha says, affectionately.

“— but I heard your conversation, afterwards. I heard enough of it. And then I saw that you stopped using your power after that, except when you had to, to protect yourself.” He pauses. “It impressed me a lot, that you could work out a rule like that for yourself. I always wanted to be able to do that.” 

“What,” she says, “stop touching everyone around you and be isolated for months on end?”

“No, that part came pretty naturally to me,” he says, surprising a laugh out of her. Then the laugh turns into hiccups, and she has to hold the phone away from her mouth while she holds her breath until they subside. God, it’s been so fucking long since she’s done E, it’s like her body has no idea what to do. 

“But I mean,” he continues, “you and I aren’t people who always know where the boundaries are. And then we got these powers, and they made it easier than ever to blur the lines. We both could have gone to some pretty dark places, I think, and well, I did, for a bit.” _Sally_ , she thinks. “But you only had to fuck up once before you made a boundary for yourself. Because you’re a good person. Because you put in the work to try to be a good person.” 

“I used that power on you,” she reminds him. “That wasn’t exactly following the girlfriend code.”

“Oh,” he says. “I used mine on you, too. I think we’re even.”

It makes her want to cry, how nice he’s being. Because he’s maybe the only person who she trusts to actually know her, know all the ways she’s fucked up. Not even Curtis knows, not really, not even after what she did to him, but Simon does. And he still says all these things about her. 

“You sound very evolved,” she says, wiping fitfully at her eyes. “You’ve gone all American on me, haven’t you?”

“I have, actually,” he says. “I’ve got a therapist and everything. It’s interesting.”

“What the fuck did you tell a therapist?” she says. “Have they got therapists for superheroes over there?”

“No,” he says. “I told mine I thought my girlfriend was dead and I tried to kill myself, and we’re still unpacking that. I imagine there’s enough material there to keep us busy for a few years before we get to the invisibility and the foresight and the everything else.”

“ _Unpacking_ ,” Alisha says. “You make it sound like you went on holiday to the land of fucked-up-edness.” 

“More of a permanent residency,” he says. “But we don’t have to live there, you know.”

She lets herself sit in that idea for a long minute. Then she says, “It’s late here — not so much there, I suppose —” Then she glances at a clock. “Shit, are you at work? You work at an office now, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but I went to a conference room where no one can hear,” Simon says. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay,” she says. “Listen. Thanks for all of this, yeah?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Any time.”

“It was nice talking to you again,” she blurts out. “I mean. Maybe we don’t have to wait for an emergency again. Maybe we could just talk sometimes.”

“I’d like that,” he says, and she thinks she can hear him smile.

*

The next morning she uses her power to check on the rapist. He’s wearing gloves.


	7. Chapter 7

_You should get a trench coat and a fedora_ , Simon says over text.

Alisha does think she would rock that look. Maybe with a bold red lip. Still, she considers it a little inappropriate as a thing for an ex-boyfriend to say to her.

_Sorry_ , he writes, before she can tell him so. _I meant like Humphrey Bogart. I wasn’t trying to tell you what to wear_.

Alisha googles Humphrey Bogart.

_Did you just tell me to dress like an old man with a squint and a receding hairline?_

_I thought you said Curtis was in a noir phase_ , Simon writes back.

_Yeah but that doesn’t mean I suddenly care about this bullshit_ , she says. _You know I only watch movies you can follow while you’re pissed or on your phone_.

_Well except for that one time with Romeo and Juliet_ , he points out.

_Shut up that was one time and you can’t fucking prove I cried_ , she says.

“Something funny?” says Richard. 

“Not really,” Alisha says. 

“All right, keep your secrets,” he says, grinning, and turns back to the pile of homework he’s grading. 

Richard does know about Simon, sort of. Rudy told him once that he seemed like he was more fun than “that starey guy.” Then he elaborated without anyone asking him to that “that starey guy” was Alisha’s ex, “only he went mental and then he moved off to America and broke her heart, didn’t he?”

“Rudy’s dramatic,” Alisha told Richard later, rolling her eyes. “I was seeing someone and the breakup got messy and then he decided he wanted a change and moved. It’s all over now, anyway.”

“Messy breakups are hard,” Richard said. “Good to get some distance, though,” and they left it at that. 

_I plan to leave all the proving to you from now on, detective_ , Simon texts her.

*

She wouldn’t say she texts with Simon all that much. 

Just when something comes up with some power bullshit and she’s not sure what to do but she thinks Simon might have a good idea. Or when she has an important question and she knows he knows the answer, like the time she’s trying to order Kelly a birthday gift and she texts Simon to remind her which brand of fancy imported lager was Kelly’s favorite. Or when she decides she wants to know what he’s been doing with himself all this time out there in America, so she texts him questions about his life. Or when something occurs to her that she thinks he’d be interested in, so she tells him all about it.

The thing is he usually is interested. Simon’s always been one of the only people she knows who genuinely thinks it’s fascinating to hear about the petty bullshit stuff she likes to talk about. Like this girl in her club crew who is a total slag when she’s sober but when she’s off her face on coke suddenly starts talking about how she’s going to commit to celibacy. _It could have something to do with religious ecstasy_ , he says when she texts him about it. _Did she grow up very C of E?_

“You don’t actually care about any of this,” she accused him once, back when they first started dating, after she told him about this one party that she thought was just supposed to be fancy dress but at least three other people there thought was a furry sex party. “You’re humoring me.”

He looked anxiously up at her, which was the way he mostly looked at her at the time. He was always so worried, back at the beginning, that she would change her mind about him any minute. “But I’m not, though,” he said. “It’s interesting to me to watch you talk about the things you’re interested in. You get very …” He seemed to be groping for a word. “Animated,” he settled on at last.

Alisha narrowed her eyes at him. He said it like it was a compliment but she wasn’t sure it was.

“Anyway I don’t know anything about parties like that,” he added hastily. “So I like hearing about them. From a distance.” He described the distance with his hand in this awkward sort of swirl, and she smiled at that without really meaning to because the gesture struck her as so sweet, and then his face lit up in delighted shock, the way he’d get back then every time she smiled at him.

Anyway. Now, of course, he’s all over the detective stuff too. It’s the sort of thing he’s always been interested in. 

_It’s really not that glamorous_ , she tells him. _People come in, they want to know where someone is, I do my thing, I tell them, they pay me_. 

_Have you ever done a stakeout_? he asks her. _Or an undercover operation_?

_Once I drove around to a lot of nursing homes_ , she offers.

_I think that counts_ , he says.

“You know I can tell when you’re sexting Richard in front of me,” Curtis says, eyeing her phone disdainfully. “Your face gets all weird.”

“What my man and I get up to is no one’s business but ours and our phone companies,” Alisha says. She texts Simon, _It definitely doesn’t count._

*

She doesn’t mention Richard to Simon, but Simon brings him up anyway. _Kelly mentioned you’ve been seeing a maths teacher_ , he says. _He sounds nice_.

_He is but we don’t have to talk about that_ , Alisha writes back.

Simon just writes back, _Ok_ , and that’s as far as that conversation goes.

She doesn’t ask him about the girl from the wedding with the wonky tits, and he doesn’t bring her up either.

She does ask him about his new job. _Something to do with video editing, Kelly and Curtis said?_ she asks.

Simon: Oh, I cut together ads for local businesses, it’s not that interesting. 

Alisha: But do you like it though? 

Alisha: It seemed like you lost interest in videos and things for a while there before

Simon: Well I don’t really have other employable skills. There’s not a huge market for being able to jump off buildings.

Alisha: Um I’ve seen films. That’s literally half the plot of any decent movie

Simon: But that’s not what I learnt how to do that for. It was supposed to be to help people.

Alisha: Oh and here I thought it was just to get in my knickers

Alisha: Sorry

Alisha: I didn’t mean to go into all that again

Simon: It’s fine. 

There’s a long quiet after that where he doesn’t say anything, and there aren’t any dots on the screen. 

Alisha fiddles with her phone and then puts it down with a determined _clunk_. Turns instead to her laptop and starts to go through her invoices. Managing her own cash is fucking exhausting; if she can afford it next quarter, she’s bringing in an accountant. Maybe she finally will hire Curtis after all.

Her phone buzzes again.

_You’re not wrong, though, it was for both_ , Simon says. _It sort of felt like the same thing to me at the time. Like if I could do all that then I could be someone who could save people and that would mean I could be someone who could deserve you. Like a real superhero_.

_There are ways to help people and ways to be in a relationship that don’t have anything to do with being a superhero_ , Alisha says. _Lots of people manage both every day without putting on a mask and trying to beat up muggers._

_Yes,_ is all Simon says to that.

*

She gets a call from a number she doesn’t recognize with an American country code at the beginning and picks it up too fast. “Hello?” she says.

“What the fuck are you doing to Barry?” says an unpleasantly familiar voice on the other end.

Alisha grimaces. “Why are you calling me?” she demands.

“Have you got any idea how long I spent picking up the pieces after you were done with him last time?” Nathan asks. “The episodes of _Star Trek_ — _Star Trek_! — that I watched? The number of intoxicated young ladies who I convinced that the strange staring and disarming shortness were actually attractive after enough alcohol? And I didn’t get to shag _any_ of the leftovers, even, because I am a married man now!” 

“First of all,” Alisha tells him, “don’t blame me that you’ve never heard of an open marriage.”

“The _Star Treks_ all had Tribbles in them,” Nathan says.

“I don’t know what that is,” Alisha says. “Second of all, if Simon doesn’t want to talk to me, he doesn’t have to. He’s a grown man, and he can make his own decisions.”

“Yeah, that’s easy for you to say,” Nathan says, “you’re not the one who has to watch him eye fuck his phone screen every time you text him. And what’s going to happen when you get sick of him and drop him this time, hm? I’ll be stuck watching _Battlemoon_ fucking _Gelataria_ , that’s what.”

“You know what the trick is,” Alisha says, “is you say you’re going to watch an episode, but then right when he’s about to start it you distract him with something he likes better.”

“Well, I’m not going to suck his cock to avoid it, it’s not _that_ bad,” Nathan says, and since that was indeed Alisha’s usual strategy she lets the statement pass. “You can mock,” he continues, “but I actually did hear about what happened last time. And I don’t think anyone wants to have to go ziplining through time with my last year’s superpower again next time you convince Barry to go for a stroll in front of a bullet.”

“Right,” Alisha says, “you can go fuck yourself, and if Simon doesn’t want to talk to me he can tell me so himself,” and she hangs up.

*

Alisha: I thought you moved to California

Simon: I did. Why?

Alisha: Why is Nathan talking like he still sees you all the time? He lives in Las Vegas

Simon: You talked to Nathan?

Simon: He and Marnie moved to California a little bit after the wedding. Marnie was sick of the casinos and Nathan says the desert wrecks havoc on his delicate skin. They ended up in the same town I’m in because they didn’t want to bother coming up with somewhere else to go.

Simon: Why were you talking to Nathan?

Alisha: He called me

Alisha: I just think it’s funny that you moved all that way and you still hang out with people from the estate

Simon: I’m sorry he called you. I’ll talk to him.

Simon: I know what you mean, though, it is funny. But it also makes sense, doesn’t it? No one else went through all the same things we went through.

Simon: I do talk to other people

Alisha: I mostly don’t

Alisha: Other people are bullshit

Simon: Exactly

“Is that Kelly?” Richard asks her. “You two must have a lot to say.”

“Yeah,” says Alisha. “She likes her birthday lager.”

*

A girl comes to see Alisha and says she’s worried her boyfriend might have hurt himself. Alisha finds him standing on a roof, so she tells the girl where he is and also gives her the information for a social worker she’s referred a couple of her clients to before. 

“It can’t just be you, you know,” she tells the girl. “If he’s in that place, it can’t just be you helping him.”

Then she figures a sign is a sign, and she gives in and does what she’s been wanting to do since she talked to Nathan and calls Simon.

“Am I fucking you up?” she asks as soon as he picks up.

“Hi,” he says, voice foggy. “Sorry. Could you say that again? It’s a little early here.”

“Is it fucking you up to talk to me?” she says. “Honestly, you can tell me, all right. Am I making you want to die?”

“A little right now,” he says. “It’s four in the morning, I thought you were calling me with an emergency.”

“I’m asking you a serious question,” she says. “I don’t want to make you want to die.”

“Oh,” he says, sounding more alert. “No. No, that’s not something you have to worry about.”

She waits, but he doesn’t elaborate. 

“That’s not something I have to worry about like you’re not going to try to hurt yourself anymore?” she asks. “Or that’s not something I have to worry about like you’re not my responsibility so it shouldn’t matter to me if you try to hurt yourself again?”

“That’s not something you have to worry about, like I’m not in that place right now, and if I get really depressed again, that won’t be your fault,” Simon says. “Like it wasn’t your fault last time.”

“Hm.” Alisha does not care for that answer. “You told me I was the only thing you were living for,” she reminds him.

He hisses in a small breath through his teeth, like the reminder hurts him. “That’s not something I should have said to you,” he says after a moment. “That wasn’t fair.”

“It was true, though,” Alisha says.

“That’s not your fault,” he says. “Anyway, I’m working on not living for one specific person anymore.”

“Simon,” Alisha says, “you could tell me if you were thinking about hurting yourself.”

“I’m not thinking about hurting myself,” he says immediately. 

“But would you tell me if you were?” she presses.

“Probably not, no,” he says. “I have a doctor I could tell, though.”

“I’d want you to tell me,” she says. “Before you did anything.”

“Alisha,” he says, voice going gentle, “you really don’t have to worry about me. I’m doing a lot better than I was when I left, I promise.”

“Okay, but is it fucking you up again to talk to me?” she says. “Because if it’s making things harder for you, we don’t have to keep doing this.”

There’s a rustle on his end of the phone. She supposes she’s woken him out of a sound sleep, so he must still be in bed. She can just picture him propping himself up against two pillows, eyes crinkled the way they get when he’s tired.

“My therapist doesn’t think it is,” he says.

“You told your therapist we were talking again?” Alisha feels scandalized. “I haven’t told anyone.”

“You’re not supposed to keep secrets from your therapist,” he points out. “Except you don’t have to tell them if you have superpowers, I think there’s an exception for that.”

“What did your therapist say?” she demands.

“She asked me how it made me feel to talk to you and I said it made me feel happy and she said that was fine,” he says. “And that if I start thinking about wanting to die for you again I should talk to her.”

“Are you thinking about that?” she asks.

There’s a little quiet.

“Sometimes,” he says. 

Alisha shuts her eyes. “Simon,” she says.

“She says it’s normal, if we’re used to associating a thought with a person, to have it recur from time to time,” he says. “The trick is to remember that the mind is a muscle, and it can be retrained like any other muscle. You just have to catch the habit of it. Like learning how to do a backflip.”

“You know most people don’t practice backflips on a _rooftop_ ,” she says. “You’re such a fucking adrenaline junkie.”

“Well,” he says, and she can hear a smile in his voice, “how else are you supposed to learn?”

“You need to tell me if this is taking you someplace you don’t want to go,” Alisha says. “I’m not going to talk to you if it’s hurting you.”

“All right,” he says, “but so far it’s not. So far I just really like talking to you.” 

“But you promise you’ll tell me?” she presses.

“Yes,” he says, in his most serious voice, “I promise.” 

He’s only lied to her in that voice once before. When he said he wasn’t going to go back. Alisha guesses he meant it at the time that he said it.

“Okay,” she says. “Thank you.”

She’s just gathering herself up to say something else, something that is maybe stupid, that maybe she shouldn’t say, when the door to her office opens.

“Hey,” says Richard, poking his head inside, “the kids are all in assembly so I snuck out. I thought maybe we could grab lunch together at that café you like.”

Alisha covers the phone with her hand. “I’m with a client,” she says. “Wait in the hall.”

He throws up his hands — _easy, easy_ — and goes to wait outside.

“Sorry,” she says into the phone. “I didn’t lock my door.”

“It’s fine.” His voice is casual. “Was that Richard?”

It’s strange somehow, hearing Simon say his name. Alisha doesn’t really like thinking of the two of them in the same universe. “Yeah,” she says. “He knows better than to bother me when I’m working, really.”

“If you had a fedora it would be clearer when you were working and when you weren’t,” Simon says, “because you’d take it off when you were off duty.” 

“This hat fantasy of yours gets kinkier every time you describe it,” Alisha says. 

He laughs. “Go have lunch with your boyfriend,” he says. “And let me sleep.”


	8. Chapter 8

When Richard splits up with her, Alisha thinks she should probably be more broken up about it than she actually is.

“You’re just so focused on your work all the time,” he tells her. “It’s incredible. I can see why it matters so much to you. But I sort of feel like the only time I ever had your complete attention is when I was your client.”

“Oh,” Alisha says, stomach sinking just a little. “I can pay more attention, probably,” she offers, but he just smiles, dimple showing in his chin, and shakes his head.

“I can’t believe I’m splitting up with a hot private detective with superpowers,” he says. “I’m a fucking idiot. Call me if you need help with your accounting, all right?”

“Yeah,” she says, and walks home feeling lighter. 

*

Alisha usually hates the feeling of being alone, but somehow she doesn’t mind it so much this time. Maybe it’s because Richard was right, and she’s got her work now, taking up space in the middle of her mind where boys used to be. Or maybe it’s because of all those awful months locked up with Simon, waiting to reach the present, alone but not quite; because she lived through that, so she knows she can handle being properly alone now. Maybe it’s because she’s got real friends now, so not having a boyfriend doesn’t feel quite so much like being abandoned anymore. 

Whatever it is, she likes it. She likes taking up too much space in her own bed and not having to argue with someone else about what to eat for dinner. She likes coming home late and not having to answer to anyone. 

She solves her cases. Her business does well enough that she can afford to hire an accountant instead of doing her taxes on her own, so she asks Richard to recommend one, and he does. She checks in on the rapist at random intervals, and every time he’s wearing gloves, even in August. A couple of times she takes a tab of E anyway and walks him to the lake, just to remind him she can.

She sees Curtis and Rudy, and Skypes with Kelly, and texts with Simon. She goes out dancing. She takes home boys when she feels like it. She rarely lets them stay the night; she has high standards.

It feels like she’s figured something out.

*

She doesn’t tell Simon she’s split up with Richard, though. Which is strange in a way, not telling him, because they’re still texting a lot.

It’s just that for once things feel low pressure with him. There’s no time loop hanging over everything anymore, no mysterious future tragedies, because they’ve already lived through all of them. She doesn’t have to worry about building up his confidence or avoiding comparing him to his other self, because he’s already become his future self, and now he’s moving past that to be someone else, someone new. 

And she can tell he isn’t worried the way he used to be about saying something so bizarre it scares her off him, or about whether she’ll decide he isn’t changing fast enough to be worth her time. So they can just talk, finally. It’s nice. He’s a nice person to talk to.

She doesn’t want to fuck with that. She doesn’t want to create an expectation.

Not that she thinks Simon’s been sitting around waiting to try to win her back the second she’s single again. He never even comes close to suggesting anything like that. But she knows he’s not seeing anyone serious, and it’s pretty clear from the way he talks to her that — well, look. Obviously he’s still in love with her. Alisha’s not fucking stupid. Simon may or may not be interested in pursuing a relationship with her right now, but those feelings are definitely still there. 

Richard is a nice comfortable barrier for those feelings. His apparent continued existence in Alisha’s life means she never has to talk to Simon about whether or not it’s possible that they might ever get back together, because that is not a question Simon will ever approach if he knows she’s seeing someone else. 

Unless, she supposes, he’s in a death spiral and he thinks it’s destiny that she split up with Curtis to be with him instead. But it’s not as though she put up a big fight on that one. 

Anyway. The nice thing about Simon thinking Alisha is still with Richard is that it means Alisha doesn’t have to consider how she currently feels about Simon, at all. 

She knows she likes talking to him. She knows she doesn’t want him to die. She doesn’t really feel prepared right now to examine things any farther than that. 

So she doesn’t.

*

It doesn’t occur to Alisha that Simon might have things he’s not telling her either, until Kelly mentions it over Skype one night.

“Do you think you’ll see Simon if he ends up moving back to London?” Kelly asks.

Alisha stares blankly at the computer screen. “If he what?”

“Simon’s thinking about moving back to London,” Kelly says. “You didn’t know?”

Alisha shakes her head, and Kelly looks beadily through the camera lens at her, head tilted like she can still read minds. “Thought you said you two were talking again,” she says.

“Yeah, I thought we were too,” Alisha says. 

*

Simon: It’s because I’m up for a job. I was going to tell you if it went anywhere.   
Simon: It probably won’t though.

Alisha: Since when are you so gungho about your job that you’re applying for secret international promotions?

Simon: No it’s a different job. It’s doing video production for this charity company for their fundraising programs. They raise money to fight malaria and polio and things like that.  
Simon: I’m not really qualified, I probably won’t get it. That’s why I didn’t mention it.

Alisha: Is that something you’re interested in now? Fighting sad diseases with video?

Simon: I think it is actually, yeah.  
Simon: I’ve been doing reading and malaria is one of the deadliest things in the world, especially in poor countries, so anything you do to stop it will actually be helping loads of people. Just by the numbers it’s probably one of the most significant things you can do.  
Simon: And I do like the videos. You’re right I lost interest in it for a bit but I’ve been remembering more that it’s good to be able to take bits and pieces of a story and put them together to make something better than it started. With production you get more control over the whole thing than with just editing too.

Alisha: Wait that’s fucking brilliant  
Alisha: This is actually perfect for you  
Alisha: Have you got an interview? Are you flying out? Can I do anything?

Simon: It’s a video interview. It probably won’t go anywhere. It’s in a couple of weeks. It really doesn’t mean that much.

Alisha: No but you’re always talking though about how you want your job to actually help people instead of just be selling bullshit no one needs  
Alisha: It’s really good you found something you could do that with  
Alisha: Like even if you don’t get this job you can get the next one and that way you can find a way to do good things  
Alisha: Idk I’m just happy for you

Simon: Thanks  
Simon: I was actually thinking about something you said a while ago, about how plenty of people do good in the world without superpowers. There’s really not that much I can do with foresight since I can’t control it at all but it’s interesting to think that there are other ways to do something meaningful  
Simon: Malaria is sort of like a zombie plague except there’s not really an efficient way to batter the carriers to death

Alisha: The lesson to be learned here is that you should always listen to me about everything

Simon: Really I think that became clear a long time ago.

*

Curtis has got a new job, too. He’s taken up as an assistant coach for the track team at a primary school, and he’s taking night classes towards a teaching degree. “It’s the only thing I’ve found that makes me feel the same as running,” he says. “Helping the kids run instead.” 

“Look at us,” Alisha says, “proper fucking grownups,” and then they do a round of shots to toast to that, and to prove that they don’t have to be quite so grown up as all that after all.

Rudy’s finished up his community service, finally. And he’s actually won over that girl Jess he was doing his community service with, too, which Alisha is mostly glad about because she was getting really sick of hearing all about Jess every time she talked to him before. Jess is so functional Alisha doesn’t see how she puts up with Rudy, but it’s nice to have another girl around when they all go out drinking. 

She does feel a little concerned that Jess and Curtis outnumber her when they decide to start judging everyone else, though. It’s just a lot of combined side-eye. 

“Who knew community service was such a fucking singles bar?” she asks Kelly. “You and Seth, Rudy and Jess. I was thinking one or two hookups _at best_ on my first day there, and instead I walked out with probably my two most significant relationships.”

“Poor Richard,” says Kelly.

“Poor Richard,” Alisha agrees.

“Me and Seth didn’t meet at community service, though,” Kelly points out. “We sold our powers between the two rounds.”

“You started dating during the second round of community service,” Alisha argues. “You never would have met in the first place if it hadn’t been for community service.”

Kelly shakes her head. “That was the powers, though.”

“But we got the powers because of community service, so it’s the same thing,” Alisha says.

Kelly looks skeptical. “You’re reaching, mate.”

*

Simon: I suppose the real question is whether we would have gotten the same powers or not if the storm hit us somewhere besides community service. All of the other powers we’ve seen on the estate makes me think we probably would have, though.

Alisha: Wow I see how it is  
Alisha: Go ahead and side with Kelly  
Alisha: Loyalty means nothing anymore

Simon: Sorry. I just think it’s important to be objective on these things.

Alisha: Hey wasn’t your interview yesterday  
Alisha: How was it

Simon: Yes.  
Simon: It was fine, I suppose.  
Simon: I really don’t think it will go anywhere. It was interesting.

“Interesting” is Simon code for “good,” so Alisha tries to figure out how she’d feel about Simon showing up in London again.

Probably it would become clear pretty quickly she’s not actually with Richard anymore, so there would be that. But would that really be so terrible? Things have been comfortable with her and Simon for a while now, and it doesn’t feel as though the comfort is all that fragile anymore. They could maybe withstand the idea that she is single. She’s pretty sure Simon wouldn’t feel compelled to pursue her if she told him she was.

In fact, Alisha is pretty sure Simon would never make a move in her general direction unless she point blank told him to do it. The only time he ever did was when he was from the future, and he did it then because she told him he was going to in the past. 

Basically if Simon came back, the ball would be in her court. Where, Alisha supposes, it’s pretty much always been. It’s just that it would be a lot more obvious this way.

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what she would want to do. She doesn’t know what she wants to happen. She doesn’t know how she feels.

She thinks that maybe it would be nice, after all this time, to see Simon again.

Not that she’ll have to think about it for a while, though, probably. Job shit always takes ages to sort out, and so does moving. Especially moving thousands of miles. So if he comes back she’ll have plenty of warning.

*

“You’ll never fucking guess what happened,” Kelly says on their next Skype call, beaming, and holds up her left hand to the webcam. There’s a diamond solitaire sparkling on her third finger.

Alisha shrieks wildly and waves her hands at the camera. “Oh my god, finally, I knew this would happen,” she says. “When’s the wedding? Am I your maid of honor? You can’t have Nathan do it, he’d be shit. Are we all flying out there? I need to get a plane ticket.”

“Nah, we’re doing it back home,” Kelly says. “I love it here, but weddings are about family, and mine’s all in London. So’s Seth’s. And we’re doing it soon, because we’ve done enough waiting. Next month, if we can get everything together fast enough. And obviously I’m not giving Nathan any responsibility. You can be a bridesmaid but I’m not doing any maid of honor bollocks.” 

“Thank fuck, I’m picking my own dress,” Alisha says. Then she catches up with the rest of what Kelly said. “So … everyone’s going to be coming back here then,” she says slowly. “For the wedding. In a month.”

“You can have an opinion on your dress but you don’t get final say,” Kelly says. “And yeah. I already talked to Nathan and Simon. Whole gang’ll be there.”


	9. Chapter 9

The night before she sees Simon again for the first time since he moved to America, Alisha has a dream.

At first, the dream is a memory. It’s a memory of a night from when they were first together. Before she got rid of her old power, and after he stopped being the him who could touch her anyway. 

In the memory, Alisha is stretched out naked on their bed with the two sets of sheets on it, and Simon is kneeling next to her fully clothed, watching through his phone camera as she works two fingers in and out of herself. 

He won’t let her watch him touch himself, and he’s still wrapping his head around the idea that she might like to see him naked. He can barely stand to let her see him watch her, not when he’s visible, not without a camera to give him something to hide behind. But this much, this much he can do. 

It’s a step, Alisha thinks. It’s not everything that she wants from him, but it’s what he is able to give her right now. And she wants to be careful with him. She wants to take care of him.

She feels heat building inside of her as she watches his eyes on her through his camera: they are giant and entranced and so fucking blue. His cheeks pink, lips parted. “The things I’m going to do to you,” she says, “when I can touch you.”

In real life, when she said that, Simon shut his eyes and his knuckles went white around his phone. As though he couldn’t bear to hear it. But in the dream, he puts down his phone and lies down next to her and kisses her. “Show me,” he says, “show me.”

Alisha pushes him back on the bed and climbs on top of him, kissing his mouth, his jaw, his throat, as he arches below her and his hands trace a line up her thighs so that his fingers can go where hers just were. She undoes his buttons and kisses his chest, using her tongue, making him moan beneath her. She wants to lavish him with kisses; wants to make him hers, utterly and forever hers; thinks, _Mine, mine, thou shalt have no others before me._

But then he rolls her beneath him and the dream shifts, and now it’s weeks before all that. It’s when he went back, and before she knew why he went back. When he was her future boy. His hands on her like she’ll shatter if he doesn’t touch her just right. “I came back for you,” he whispers into her skin.

“But how could you do that to me?” she asks.

He just shakes his head. “All of it was for you,” he tells her, and slips his mouth over her right nipple. One finger inside her, working its way lazily in and out, and another gentle as butterfly wings over her clit.

Her body feels like it’s going to shake apart, everything he’s doing feels so good, but there’s something cold in her chest. “No,” she says, jerking herself away from him. 

And then the dream shifts again, and then he’s just Simon. No particular version of him, just her weird beautiful freak, sitting next to her on the bed amidst rumpled sheets. He’s serious, and his eyes look tired and warm. “We don’t have to live there forever, you know,” he says. 

Alisha wakes up.

*

Kelly and Seth come back to London a month after Kelly told Alisha they were getting married. “It’s taking two more fucking weeks than I wanted, can you believe it?” Kelly says. “The shit people think they can get away with when it’s for a wedding.” 

Kelly’s not actually doing most of the work. Seth is, bustling about importantly with a clipboard and repeating over and over again, “I used to run my own business!”

“He was a _drug dealer_ ,” Curtis says to Alisha. “That’s not the same thing at all.” 

“Tell Kelly that,” Alisha dares him, and he looks behind him to make sure Kelly didn’t hear. 

But it all comes together, somehow: the ceremony booked in the little church Curtis’s family goes to, because it’s a family connection; catering from the relations of a family Kelly’s got to know in Uganda, as their wedding gift to her; flowers from one of Seth’s old clients who owns a flower shop. 

“The only thing is,” Seth says, “it’s tricky to find a place for the reception at the last minute like this. And actually, there was only one place free.”

“If you say what you think I’m going to say I will fucking punch you,” Kelly says. Alisha covers her eyes in horror.

“The community center!” Seth says, spreading his hands: _tada_. 

“That’s just sad,” says Curtis, shaking his head.

“It’s romantic,” says Seth. “It’s full circle. It’s what it’s all been building up to.”

“Your wedding reception is going to smell like spoiled milk and unburied probation worker,” Alisha says.

But at least they’ve got all the big details sorted out. And Alisha consults on Kelly’s dress — mermaid, with sequins on the bodice — and on the best kind of underpinnings to go with it to make the most of Kelly’s tits. Kelly does not allow her to go leopard print for her bridesmaid dress, which is Alisha’s first choice, but they compromise on something metallic and gold and drapey that Alisha thinks will get the job done regardless.

“What job?” Kelly asks.

“Making me look so hot I upstage the bride and everyone ignores you to fawn over me,” Alisha answers promptly. Kelly sniffs at that, and Alisha throws her arms around her and promises that by the time they’re through with Kelly, “no one’ll be able to take their eyes off you, I mean it.”

That whole first week after Kelly and Seth come back whirls by in a dizzy montage of dress appointments and church viewings and cake tastings. Alisha tells her clients she’s taking time off. It’s the longest she’s been away from her office since she first opened the agency.

On the second week, Nathan and Simon fly in.

*

Alisha goes to meet them at the airport, because she’s still the only one of them with a car. “Is that all right, mate?” Kelly asks her, and Alisha rolls her eyes and assures her that it’s _fine, honestly_.

She hears them before she sees them. Well, she hears Nathan, anyway: his voice carrying through the terminal as he goes on about how he’s positive that the pilots on transatlantic flights shit themselves. “Just think about it, man!” he says. “When do they have time to get up?” Then they come around the corner and she sees them, Nathan smirking at his own disgustingness, Simon shaking his head and looking appalled as he says something she can’t hear that looks like a protest. 

It’s funny to see him after everything. The same but not. She’s used to thinking about him as the present him and the future him, but she knows that both of those Simons are the past him now. So she’s been reminding herself, in the days leading up to this meeting, that he’s someone else now. Someone she’s still getting to know. 

But when she sees him, the first thing she thinks is that after all, he’s still just Simon. 

He’s kept the muscle he picked up from the parkour, and the confidence. But that religious intensity he carried around all the time when he was from the future is gone now, and so is that sense of bone-deep sadness. He looks like a regular bloke, one who makes polite eye contact and knows how to do small talk. He looks like that freak who stuck his dead girlfriend in a freezer. He looks like that mysterious masked man who could touch her like no one ever touched her before. He looks like Simon.

His eyes are scanning around the terminal. He’s looking for her, she thinks.

So she steps forward, shrugging her shoulders and raising her eyebrows: _well, here we are_. And he sees her, and his face does a wonderful thing: his eyes go wide and dark, his mouth goes soft; his whole body looks lit up. As though he is astonished, delighted, just by the sight of her. She can feel herself smiling without meaning to in response, which she forgot is a thing that happens to her a lot when she’s around him. 

“Hiya,” she says when they reach her. “How was the flight?”

“I think our pilot shat himself,” Nathan says.

“Hi,” says Simon, eyes gentle and intent on her face. “It’s really good to see you.”

“Yeah, you too,” she says, and shit, she’s fucking _beaming_ at him now, it’s terrible.

“This is disgusting,” Nathan remarks. “I can’t believe I’m putting up with the two of you for a whole week. Kelly should be giving me a present for this.” 

“It’s nice to see America hasn’t changed you,” Alisha says. “You’re still a prick.”

“Marnie and the baby send their love to you, too,” he says, and they go to pick up the bags.

*

She drives them from the airport to Simon’s mum and dad’s, which is where they’re both staying, and the whole way there Simon keeps watching her. She thinks he doesn’t mean to, because sometimes he’ll catch himself and look away. But every time his eyes steal back to her as though he can’t help himself. 

She doesn’t have to talk much because Nathan keeps up a steady stream of chatter the whole time about how now that he’s an international man of mystery all of London is going to bow before him and the estate better prepare itself, so instead she concentrates on controlling her face. It keeps wanting to smile at Simon, even though as the dumper in this situation she feels entitled to stay aloof and inaccessible. She scowls at Nathan through the rearview mirror and tries to avoid meeting Simon’s eyes.

When they get to the house she plans to drive away as soon as they’re out of the car. But then his little sister is running out to hug him, and as soon as she sees Alisha she’s exclaiming, “We haven’t seen you in _ages_!” so then Alisha has to go inside to see what kind of nail polish thirteen-year-old June is wearing these days, and whether her earrings work for her face shape. 

She tells June to try turquoise polish and stick to gold studs for the time being, and then she walks out to find Simon’s mum haranguing Nathan about being too thin and feeding him biscuits, while Simon and his dad silently compete to see who can carry more of the luggage inside. When they see her, Mrs. Bellamy leaves Nathan to devour every biscuit in her kitchen, Mr. Bellamy leaves Simon to carry in the rest of the bags (Simon appears triumphant), and they rush over to fuss at her. They’re both grateful to her to the point that it’s a little embarrassing, that she ever deigned to date their son, but she’s always gotten on fine with them. Honestly, it’s beyond Alisha how such textbook normal parents produced someone like Simon.

She makes polite conversation about how it’s lucky that the weather is so fine for this time of year, and how it will be nice for the wedding. Behind their shoulders Nathan gorges himself on digestive biscuits and Simon totes in endless bags, managing to look both hunted with embarrassment and also delighted. He keeps trying to shoot her apologetic looks, but every time he makes eye contact with her it’s like someone’s switched on a lamp behind his eyes, which spoils the effect a little. Alisha’s not entirely certain that her own face is behaving itself just now, either, despite her laudable ice queen resolutions.

At last she remarks, “Well, I’ve got to go, I’ve got a big client meeting,” which is her all-purpose social white lie these days. Nathan mutters something obscene into his biscuits about the sort of clients she’s seeing, and Mrs. Bellamy cuts off the tangent she’s been building from Kelly’s wedding to weddings in general, which Alisha doesn’t think was heading anywhere good. 

“I’ll walk you out,” says Simon, which is ridiculous because it will take Alisha literally five steps to get from the front door to her car, and his mum and dad exchange speaking looks and fade away so deliberately that Alisha half expects them to start tiptoeing. Nathan, unmoved, crunches his biscuits loudly.

So Alisha lets Simon walk her out to the car, but when they get there he doesn’t quite seem to know what to say.

“They seemed happy to see you,” he says at last.

“Yeah,” she says. “So should I tell your mum that the ‘thank you for deflowering my son’ T-shirt she ordered me never arrived, or …?” 

“Oh, it was a certificate, it’ll be held up at the frame shop,” he says, and looks pleased with himself when she laughs. 

“You must be very busy with work,” he says, and she nods, even though she’s told all her clients she’s out of her office until after the wedding. “But I’ll see you at all the wedding stuff, won’t I?”

“Kelly’s got us working nonstop,” Alisha confirms. “I don’t know what they’re thinking, trying to get it all done so fast.” 

“I suppose they got tired of waiting,” he says, “if they know what they want.”

Ridiculously, her heart beats faster at that. 

“We should get a drink if you have time,” he goes on, “and catch up properly.”

Did Simon just ask her out on a _date_? Did Simon just _do a good job_ of asking her out on a date? He didn’t even blush. God, he’s really grown up.

Wait, no, he can’t have asked her out on a date. He thinks she’s still got a boyfriend. Which means it’s safe.

“Yeah,” she says, “I’d like that.” Then, “I’ll check my schedule,” because after all she is going for aloof here. 

“All right,” he says, “let me know,” and then he opens her car door for her.

Alisha gets into the car, feeling unsettled. That was … maybe smooth? Does Simon know how to be smooth now? What has he been getting up to in America that he hasn’t been telling her about?

“Kelly wants us at the estate bar tonight at nine,” she tells him, craning her head through the window. “And she says don’t let Nathan piss off the bartender if he gets there before the rest of us.”

Simon grimaces. “Well, I’m not a miracle worker,” he says.

“You’re the one answering to Kelly if you fuck it up,” she tells him gleefully, and drives away.


	10. Chapter 10

It’s funny how easy it is when the five of them all hang out, even after all this time. The rest of the week they can bring in the others — Seth, Rudy, Rudy’s hangers-on maybe, the rest of the wedding party — but this first night it’s just the five of them who started everything together.

When Alisha gets to the bar, Curtis is the first one there. He’s chatting up the bartender, so she wingmans him, going on about how many girls she’s just spoken to who are dying for him to call them, until the bartender slides him her number on a cocktail napkin and tells him when she gets off her shift. 

“You’re welcome, and you can pay for the rest of my drinks tonight,” Alisha tells Curtis after the bartender goes.

He looks annoyed. “I was in there, man, I didn’t need your help,” he says, as Kelly comes in and sits down next to them.

“You always need her help,” Kelly says, and Alisha crows with triumph.

“You don’t even know what we’re talking about!” Curtis protests, and Kelly rolls her eyes and orders a pint of lager.

Nathan and Simon don’t come in until twenty minutes later, by which point Alisha is already well into her vodka tonic. “ _Kelly_ , my love!” Nathan cries, and Kelly looks stoic as he flings himself against her, squeezing her tight. “Have you survived without me?” he asks. “Are you holding up through the withdrawal? Shall I get you something for the shock?”

“Such a fucking dick,” Kelly says.

“So you’re not even going to acknowledge me,” Curtis says.

“Oh hey man,” Nathan says over Kelly’s head.

Curtis shakes his head and does some sort of manly handshake thing with Simon, which seems funnier to Alisha than it probably actually is. “So you’d rather show up late than try to actually control Nathan,” she tells Simon. “Coward.”

“We play the hand we’re dealt,” he says, and goes to hug Kelly after Nathan finally lets go of her and legs it to the bartender.

It takes only ten minutes before Nathan has alienated the bartender enough that she takes back the napkin with her number on it from Curtis, threatens to throw them all out, and stalks away. Alisha gazes sadly at her drink, which could use a refill, and resigns herself to being satisfied with only one. 

“I’ve got it,” Simon says, grim-faced, and gets up and hurries after the bartender.

“Oh, I see this helping,” says Curtis. “We may as well just clear out now.”

“Nah, Barry’s good for cleanup,” Nathan says, and busies himself demanding details of Kelly and Seth’s sex life. Kelly shakes her head and grits her teeth a lot.

Over Kelly’s shoulder, Alisha watches Simon talking earnestly to the bartender. Lots of eye contact, the occasional smile with teeth. Is he flirting? Maybe a little bit. He’s gesturing towards Curtis a lot for it to be flirting on his own behalf, though.

When Simon comes back he’s got a fresh round for all of them, and he hands Curtis a new cocktail napkin with the bartender’s number on it without a word.

“Oh man,” Curtis says, “you really came through.” He tosses his best smile in the bartender’s direction, then turns to Alisha. “See, _this_ is what helping looks like.” 

“All right,” Alisha says. “If that’s how it is, you can fend for yourself next time I find you trying to chat up that girl at that coffee shop with all the henna tattoos.”

“But all I did,” Nathan says, “was ask her about the surgeon who did her breasts! Women in California understand that’s a compliment, don’t they, Barry?”

“No,” Simon says patiently. “I’ve told you before, it’s not a compliment anywhere.”

“Marnie’s always flattered when I ask her,” Nathan retorts. 

“Why would you ask your own wife if she got a boob job?” Alisha asks. “Shouldn’t you know?”

“To keep the romance alive!” Nathan cries. “This is what marriage is all about! Kelly gets it.”

“If Seth ever asks me that, I’m divorcing him before he finishes the sentence,” Kelly says. “Then I’m kicking him in the balls.”

“So keeping it restrained, then,” Curtis says.

“Every marriage has its own traditions,” Nathan proclaims. “And now I shall pass on to you the benefit of my hard-earned wisdom.”

“Fuck’s sake,” says Kelly.

Alisha rolls her eyes. She sees no reason she should need to listen to this. Instead she edges away from the bar, grabbing Simon by his sleeve to pull him after her. 

Habit, mostly. She used to grab his sleeve like that when she couldn’t touch him, so now she does it without thinking. Probably the same reason he used to spend so much time playing with her hair. 

He follows after her like it’s automatic, as though it doesn’t occur to him that he doesn’t have to. He still looks so fucking happy every time he looks at her.

“Hey,” she says, “have you heard back about that job yet?”

“I haven’t,” he says. “I doubt I will, honestly. Most places don’t even bother to send out rejections anymore.”

It would sound convincing, if she hadn’t heard him lie before. Alisha narrows her eyes at him. At first he just looks back at her, but then his eyes drop down to his hands.

“You’re _such_ a fucking liar,” she says with satisfaction. “I can’t believe you think you can get away with this shit just because I haven’t seen you in a while.”

“Well, they offered me the job,” he begins, and she gasps and punches him on the shoulder. “But I’m not sure if I should say yes or not.”

“Simon! That’s brilliant, I’m really pleased for you,” Alisha says. “Why aren’t you sure what you’re going to tell them?”

Simon’s eyes flit in a desperate circle around the bar. Then they land on her face and settle there, like he can’t quite help but look at her. “I’m not sure,” he says, “if it’s a good idea for me to be here. To live, I mean.”

“Oh,” Alisha says, feeling her smile fade away. “You mean, because of me?”

“It’s not your fault,” he says at once. “It’s all on me.”

She swallows. “You told me you’d let me know if you started thinking about hurting yourself a lot again.”

“I’m not,” he says. “That’s not it. It’s just — I sort of want to get out of your way.”

Her eyebrows go up. “ _Out of my way_?” she repeats. “The fuck is that supposed to mean?”

Simon looks wretched, but he meets her eyes. “I mean what I did to you before,” he says. “With the loop. It was selfish. You told me you didn’t want that. I knew you didn’t. I shouldn’t have tried to do it. It’s indefensible. It’s like I was trying to trap you in this one spot, and now you’ve moved so far past that. You’ve done so much. I want you to be able to keep doing that. I want to get out of your way.” 

Alisha takes a moment. Tries to collect herself. 

It’s like her breath won’t stay in her body. Like that time when she died.

She never thought he’d actually say that to her. Never thought he’d apologize for it. 

Something tight inside of her is going loose. 

“Well, it’s not like you could do anything to stop me now,” she tells him finally. “Be funny if you tried.”

Simon goes very still. He looks at her like he doesn’t quite know what he’s looking at, which strikes her as funny, all of a sudden.

“Listen, you mean a lot to me, but you’re giving yourself a lot of credit if you think I’ll — what — give up my business or something, just because you move to town,” she says. “I get it if you think it would be too weird for us to be neighbors after everything. But you really don’t have to worry about holding me back or whatever if you decide to take this job.” 

Simon looks lost, looks overwhelmed. His eyes bright on hers. “I can never apologize to you,” he says, “for what I did.”

“Yeah,” Alisha says. “What you did was fucked up. I know why you did it, but all the same, it was. It fucked me up, kind of a lot. But it didn’t ruin me. You can’t ruin me.” 

When he doesn’t say anything, she rolls her eyes. “Now you’re just doing your starey thing again,” she says. “Honestly, I’m fine. Really. Stop worrying you’re going to ruin my life just by existing.” 

“I’ll try not to worry,” he says slowly, still very much doing his starey thing, “if you try to stop worrying about messing me up just by talking to me.”

Alisha grins and shrugs. “No promises,” she says. “Get me another drink and I’ll see what I can do.”

“Just because you couldn’t scam Curtis into buying them for you,” Simon says, but he’s smiling when he goes over to the bar to order another round. 

At the group’s spot down the bar, Nathan is still declaiming. “And _that’s_ where the vow to honor each other’s bodily fluids really comes in handy,” he explains.   
Curtis has taken several giant steps away from him, and Kelly looks green. “If you try to make a toast at the reception, I’ll fucking batter you,” she says.

“Oh, the reception toast I’ve got planned is much longer than this!” Nathan says. “The grans’ll all be crying so hard they’ll wet their frilly knickers.”

“I already gave the DJ a bribe not to give the microphone to anyone I haven’t approved,” Alisha says, rejoining. “Guess what: you’re not on the approved list.”

Nathan appears deeply betrayed. “That you would do this to me,” he says, “one of your closest friends —”

“I’m not your friend,” she says. Why does she always have to remind him this? 

“See, this is why _she’s_ bridesmaid and you’re not even an usher,” Kelly says.

“Can you bribe the DJ to play decent music?” Curtis asks with interest.

“That’s just called tipping,” Simon says, appearing with fresh drinks. “It’s what you’re supposed to do.”

“This is going to be the wedding of the fucking century,” Alisha says. 

*

It’s still easier to talk to Simon than probably anyone else she knows. Even when she can’t stop thinking about what he said to her. 

He drives with her to pick up the sound equipment Kelly and Seth are renting for the reception, and they talk about how surprising it is that no one’s tried to kill Nathan since he sold his immortality, and how weird American eggs are, and whether Alisha should try to get an actual private detective’s license.

“The thing is, actual detectiving sounds boring as shit,” she says. “Why would I fuck around with that when I can just do my thing and call it a day?”

“But you do actual detecting all the time,” Simon argues. “Every time you see through someone’s eyes and don’t see a sign or any clear landmarks, you have to do detective work to work out where they are.”

“But that’s not, like, _real_ detective work,” Alisha says. “With a magnifying glass or whatever.”

“It is real, because you’re following clues to build a case,” Simon says. “Also I think they use computers these days instead of magnifying glasses.”

“Watching every episode of _Sherlock_ doesn’t make you an expert on detective work,” she says.

“Clearly you’re the expert, because you’re the actual detective,” he says. “And I think if you get a license you can charge more. Also you don’t have to worry about the police coming after you for operating without a license.”

“Listen, I haven’t worried about the police through four murdered probation workers and a pep squad’s worth of battered cheerleaders, I’m not going to let off-license detective work be the thing that breaks that streak,” she says. “The cash thing is a good point, though.”

Simon doesn’t ask her about Richard. Even though he must be expecting to meet him at some point this week. She sort of gets the feeling he’s putting off the moment Richard will have to come up deliberately, for as long as he can. She’s doing the same thing, so she has no intention of forcing the issue.

The whole drive there and back, and as they set up the sound system, he keeps watching her sidelong, like he doesn’t mean to let himself do it. It makes her want to preen and pose, but she can’t, because she’s too busy trying not to let herself watch him instead: the way his eyes laugh when she insults him; the strong solid line of his shoulders under his T-shirt as he lifts and carries; his hands resting on the door of her car as she drives. 

The way she wants him feels illogical to her. She knows he’s fit now, but it’s more than that. Sometimes she wanted him this way before he was fit, back when his shoulders were narrow and his hair was too neat. She maybe would still want him this way if he were still like that. It’s something else, something to do with his eyes and his hands and the way it feels every time he looks at her.

Dangerous, to want someone like that. You can get hurt. She got hurt. Simon hurt her. Simon did something she shouldn’t ever, ever forgive. He did it and then he went and he tried to get better, he’s doing so much better, and he wants to never do anything like that again, and _I want to get out of your way_ plays on a loop in Alisha’s head.

They finish with the sound system, and she goes back to her office with the closed sign on the door and stares at her email inbox with the auto response on and prays for a fucking walk-in but no one comes.

The next day she’s handling dresses with Kelly, which is fine. But the day after it’s the five of them all again setting up the tables and chairs in the community center and stuffing gift bags. They lift and carry and stuff, and they all talk about how Kelly’s the only one of them who hasn’t had to use the immortality power yet, and how probably it’s because she’s better than all the rest of them.

“Seth gave it to me, though, just in case,” Kelly says. “As a wedding gift. It was dead fucking romantic.”

“Little rude that he just assumed he could have it back from me without asking first, though,” says Curtis.

“And what if _I’d_ like it back at some point,” Nathan says, “seeing as it was mine to begin with?”

The three of them start bickering comfortably over who’s entitled to immortality, and Alisha watches Simon try not to watch her, and she thinks about him saying, _I can’t ever apologize to you for what I did_ , and she tries not to look back at him too hard either.

When she gets up to take a call from the shop about Kelly’s dress, Curtis gets up too and follows after her. “Hey,” he says, when she hangs up the phone. “Do you know what you’re doing? It’s not my business or anything, but there’s a lot of staring going on in that room, from a lot of different directions.”

“Not really, no,” Alisha admits. “It’s a lot. I thought maybe it wouldn’t be but it’s a whole fucking lot. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know.”

“Okay,” Curtis says. “That’s okay. Let me know if you want me to kick his arse, yeah?”

“Obviously I’d ask Kelly,” Alisha says. 

“This close to her wedding, though?” Curtis raises a judgmental eyebrow.

“Fuck’s sake, fine,” Alisha says. “I’ll ask you if it comes to that.”

“For anything, I mean,” Curtis says.

“Yeah,” Alisha says. “Thanks.”

They go back to join the rest of the group, and Simon glances up from the frilly doily he’s folding into a gift bag to look at her, and their eyes meet, and Alisha hears in her head, _You’ve done so much, I want you to be able to keep doing that_ , and she feels her whole body shudder and contract.

When the bags are finally done and all the rest of them start filing out the door, she hangs back, pulls on his sleeve. “Hey,” she says, “d’you still want to get that drink?”


	11. Chapter 11

Instead of going to the bar on the estate again, she takes him to the bar where she used to work, those awful months they spent together waiting to catch up to the present. “I know, bad memories,” she says as they go in. “But I never have to pay for my own drinks here.”

“I mean, I asked you, I would pay,” Simon says. “But I’m interested to see this place. I never actually did, you know.”

“Didn’t you?” Alisha thinks about it. “I guess we weren’t really on workplace-tour terms at the time.” She settles them in a booth in the back corner, and the bartender she shagged that one time nods to her and starts putting together her usual without her having to ask.

“Are we now?” Simon asks. “Do I get to see your detective office?”

“It’s an _office_ ,” Alisha says. “It’s got a desk and a chair and some fairy lights, it’s nothing special.”

“I’ve never seen a detective’s office with fairy lights in it before,” Simon says.

“Watching every episode of _Sherlock_ doesn’t make you an expert on detective office decor either,” Alisha says. The bartender comes over with her vodka tonic and lime and she starts to order Simon a beer, but he interrupts to say, “Whiskey neat, please.”

“Well, look at you so grown up,” she teases, as the bartender throws her a conspiratorial look and leaves. 

Simon looks irritated at that. “Anyway, I know about detective offices from covering up all the accidental _murders_ , remember? I had to go down to the police station to talk Lucy down from turning us all in.”

“Oh right!” Alisha does remember that one. “And they didn’t have fairy lights there?”

“They must have missed the detective memo,” Simon says.

“Well, I’ll tell you what,” Alisha says. “If you decide to take this job in London and then you show me your new office there, I will show you my film noir fairy lights.”

She’s joking, mostly, but when he looks at her he isn’t. “Do you want me to take it?” he asks, very seriously.

That’s more intensity than Alisha currently feels prepared to deal with. More pressure. She doesn’t want to talk about the future just now. She doesn’t want to have to feel responsible for any of Simon’s decisions. “I want you to pick whatever will make you happy,” she says evasively. “You can also just give me a video tour of your office in America if you’d rather.” 

She’s saved from having to talk about it any further when the bartender comes back with Simon’s drink. It’s faster than he usually is, and Alisha is pretty sure it’s because he wants to eavesdrop. She frowns reprovingly at him as he sets down the drink, and he grins, unrepentant. “Enjoy,” he says, voice insinuating, and she has to glare at him harder before he walks away.

“Such a dick sometimes,” Alisha says. She turns back to Simon, and sees that he is looking between her and the bartender and back again, and quick and vivid as a nightmare she sees him looking at her in her yesterday’s dress the morning after she shagged the bartender and saying, _Oh_. “Hm,” is all he says now.

“He’s just nosy,” Alisha says, voice too high. “We’re not really friends or anything.” 

“You never like admitting when you’re friends with people,” Simon observes, face neutral, and drinks his whiskey.

“That’s a ridiculous thing to say,” Alisha says. “I’ve got so many friends.”

“You always say you’re not friends with Nathan,” he says.

“Because I’m not,” she interjects.

“But you’ve both saved each others’ lives multiple times,” he says.

“Well, that’s different,” Alisha says. “That’s the group. We’re all, you know … murder buddies or whatever.”

“ _Murder buddies_ ,” Simon repeats. His eyebrows are going way up, the way they always used to get before when he was trying not to laugh. It’s much better than that neutral putting-things-together face. 

“We deal with all the bullshit!” Alisha says. “The powers and the murders and the dead bodies. It’s just what we do. That doesn’t mean I _like_ Nathan. And I’ve never moved a dead body with that guy,” she adds, nodding in the bartender’s direction, “so I’m not even murder buddies with him.” And then, just to make sure she’s being really clear, “That means I like _Nathan_ more than I like him.”

“Which is not at all,” Simon notes. He’s going to give up on not laughing any second now, Alisha can tell.

“Well, obviously,” Alisha huffs. “Are you new?”

“Practically,” he says. “I’ve been away for a long while now.” 

Alisha tilts her head consideringly to one side. “I don’t know,” she says. “I know you’ve changed, but you still look the same to me.” 

That potential laughter starts to drain out of his face. “That’s probably not a good thing,” he says.

“No, it is,” she insists. “I mean, I know you’re doing better now than you were before and all that. And I’m really glad you are. But you’re still you. Every time you change like this, you’re always just still you.”

Simon’s stare is bewildered.

“It’s nice, that’s all,” she says. “I like having you around.”

“Oh,” says Simon, but not the way he said _oh_ that time with the bartender. Then he was saying it because he was hurting so badly it was the only thing he could say, but now it’s because he is so pleased that it is the only thing he can say. His face is full of it, of how delighted he is, and it is lighting up his eyes and overflowing out across his cheeks as he blushes and stares down at his glass and tries so hard not to smile.

 _I want to get out of your way_ , Alisha hears in her head.

“I like having you around more than Nathan, anyway,” she adds, because it’s turning into something too significant, this moment; it needs to be punctured a little. But that’s the thing that finally makes him laugh outright, and after that it all feels easy again.

They talk about the wedding, and whether there’s any way to make the community center look actually decent for the reception. 

“Seth’s bought a wankload of balloons,” Alisha offers.

“I don’t think there’s enough balloons in the world,” Simon says flatly.

She asks him about California, and whether he’s finally tracked down an alien invasion yet, and he tells her he’s been keeping an eye on the news to see if there’s anywhere over there that’s dealt with something like their storm, but he hasn’t found it yet. “There must be something, though,” he says. “What else happens in America?”

She tells him about work, and this case she dealt with where a bloke tried to hire her to track down someone with the power to shit gold. “Which, first of all, I physically couldn’t do, that’s not enough information for my power to work with, even supposing someone with that power exists,” she says. “Second of all, he clearly was going to try to rob whoever it was. I mean, who wouldn’t?”

“So did you kick him out?” Simon asks.

Alisha rolls her eyes. “I would’ve, but he got all big and scary and scowly. Said he’d make me tell him if he had to. So I faked it. Told him he’d find the guy he was looking for over by where this fucking terrifying gang hangs out. One of them owes me a favor, because I found his little sister’s kitten, so they took care of it for me.”

“Christ,” says Simon. “Are you in that kind of situation a lot?”

 _Simon tried to kill himself when he thought you were dead, so who knows how he’d react if he thought you were putting yourself in danger every day_ , says a voice in Alisha’s head, and she starts to say, “Not really.” But then she thinks about _I want to get out of your way_ , and the way he’d helped her with the rapist over the phone, so calm and so willing to let her do what she needed to do to fix the situation herself, and instead she says, “Sometimes, yeah.” 

“And you still have that guy from earlier to keep checking in on,” he notes. “You’d tell me if anything happened there, wouldn’t you? I’d feel responsible, since it was my idea.”

“Yeah, I would, but nothing ever has,” she says. “I look in on him and he’s always wearing gloves. I do take him out for a spin occasionally, so he knows I’m there, but I’m always careful not look at anything with a reflection. It’s a decent excuse to pick up some E.”

“There’s probably another way to reverse our powers that’s more efficient,” Simon says. “Although I don’t know what reversed foresight would look like. It would just be hindsight, wouldn’t it? And I’ve already got plenty of that.”

“Doing it any other way wouldn’t be nearly as fun,” Alisha says. “Anyway, stuff comes up, but it’s always the kind of petty bullshit I can handle on my own. I know where to go to for help if I need it.”

“Yes,” says Simon, “you’ve always been good at this sort of thing,” and Alisha feels herself blushing helplessly, even though she’s positive that’s bullshit, because she never even cared about trying at this sort of thing until well after she got superpowers. “You’re good at talking down bullies,” he adds. “You know how to find their weak points and make them walk away when you have to, without escalating things into a fight.” 

It’s a very Simon thing, to notice that she’s good at talking shit at people and somehow make it sound heroic. He always does that with her; he finds the things she doesn’t like about herself and acts like they’re assets. She doesn’t understand how he does it so unerringly, and even though she shouldn’t, even though Alisha always told herself this was a question she was never going to ask, it comes tumbling out of her: “Hey, when you went back, what did you think of me?”

He looks startled. “What do you mean?”

“I mean what did you think of me?” Alisha wraps her fingers restlessly around her cocktail glass. It’s her third, or she wouldn’t have let herself say it. She’s committed now, though. “We’ve never really talked about it,” she adds. “What it was like when you went back. Not when we both remember.”

“I thought we talked about it enough,” Simon says slowly, “when you said it was the worst thing that ever happened to you.”

“I mean, yeah, it was,” Alisha says. “But not all of it. Anyway, I want to know. So will you please just fucking tell me?”

He’s just doing his starey thing at this point. “I think it should be pretty clear what I thought of you,” he says. “I was there to try to make you fall in love with me. You were all I was thinking about.”

“Yeah,” Alisha says, “but when I was all you were thinking about, what exactly were you thinking about me?”

“Mostly that I wasn’t going to live in a world without you in it,” Simon says. “It’s really not something I like going back over. Where is this coming from?”

“Fuck’s sake, Simon,” she snaps, “you of all people should understand what it’s like, the number of times we talked about whether I liked you better when you were from the future. I did the reassuring thing then; it’s your turn now.”

His eyes go wide. “Are you — ” he starts, and then stops himself mid-sentence. Then he starts again. “Are you honestly asking me to reassure you that during the time I was planning to die in order to keep the sequence of events that led to our relationship intact, I still liked you?”

“You asked me to reassure you I liked you all the time when I was dating you,” Alisha says. “I don’t see such a difference.” 

He looks incredulous, stunned almost into speechlessness, and she loses some of her bravado. 

“I wasn’t very good back then,” she says to her cocktail glass, “at thinking about being nice to people. I wasn’t a very nice person.”

“Alisha,” Simon says, sounding lost.

“I was trying a lot more by the time we properly got together,” she says. “In the present, I mean. And you and I didn’t really spend much time together before then, so I was hoping for a while you wouldn’t have to deal with me too much the way I was before. Because when I think about myself then I just think I was shallow and bitchy. I don’t like that you were with me when I was like that.”

Simon is silent for a moment, like he’s taking in what she said. He always spends so much time thinking about what she says to him. Like all of it matters.

“I don’t think you were shallow or bitchy,” he says at last. “I never thought that, not either of the times I knew you then. When I went back, I thought that you seemed lonely, and like you were sadder than I realized the first time around. But you were always you. And I loved you both times.”

He says that last part very low, like maybe if he says it quietly enough she won’t hear it, and she looks at her vodka tonic and lime and tries to pretend like she didn’t.

“You were younger, too,” he adds suddenly. “That’s the other thing; it had only been a few months, but you seemed young to me. I suppose because the worst thing that ever happened to you hadn’t happened yet. Because I hadn’t done that to you, yet.” His voice goes thick and dry on the last sentence.

Alisha swallows. “It was the best thing, too,” she blurts out. “If it hadn’t been for the way it ended. If it weren’t for why you did it. It would have been the best thing. That’s part of what makes me so angry. Because I thought it was all so perfect, I had been so lonely and you made me so happy, and all the time you were planning to do that.”

Simon’s hands are twitching up, like he wants to cover his face, but then he clenches them resolutely around the edge of the table. “I know,” he says. “I know it was terrible. I know I never should have done it. I should have broken the loop, and it would have been worth it. Even if it changed history. Even if you never looked twice at me. Even if I stayed that freak in the corner who everyone hated. It would have been worth it, if you got to live and be happy.”

“You always say that,” Alisha says. “That if we broke the loop we never would have been together. I don’t see how you can be so sure of that. You sit here and you tell me you don’t think I’m shallow, and then you act like I needed you to put on two stone of muscle before I’d spend my time on you. I never asked you to do that.” She pauses to take a restorative sip of her drink. “I probably would have needed you to get a haircut, though,” she adds as an afterthought. “Or at least some product or something. It was really bad when we first met.” 

“I really liked that hair,” Simon says. “I put a lot of effort into it.”

“I don’t think you would have felt about yourself the way you did in the beginning forever, either,” Alisha says. “You were already loads more confident than you used to be by the time our first round of community service ended, before I ever told you about the loop. You already had real friends; you had already started figuring out a version of yourself who you liked. You even pulled that slag with the psycho dad.” Alisha remembers Jessica’s name, but she feels entitled to be a little petty on this one. He could have broken that part of the loop if he wanted, too. He knew it bothered her.

“She was a nice girl,” Simon says. He won’t quite look at her.

“Yeah, well,” Alisha says. “Like I said, I’m not always nice.”

He still won’t look up, but the corners of his mouth twitch. Simon always kind of got a kick out of her being mean, Alisha remembers. 

“You put me in a freezer,” Alisha tells him, “and the reason you did it for doesn’t even make sense. Because I think I would have been with you anyway.”

Simon closes his eyes at that, and he sits very still. Head bowed. 

“The way I hated myself then,” he says, after a long minute. “It ate me up, I think. It ate up the way that I loved you.”

She reaches across the table and takes his hand. Skin on skin. 

Since she got rid of her last power, Alisha’s started to be very aware of when she touches people, and how often. So she knows for certain that this is the first time she’s touched Simon’s skin since that night just before Christmas, that terrible time last year. When they were living the past again.

He wraps his fingers around her palm, thumb on her pulse point, and she feels a wave of warmth go through her. Like the first time they lived through that night, the time that was only bittersweet. When he touched her and for him it was the first time he’d ever done it, and his hands on her skin were the warmest thing she could remember feeling.

“I’m glad you’re doing better now, Simon,” she says.


	12. Chapter 12

The rehearsal for Kelly’s wedding to Seth is an absolute fucking mess. Which is predictable as soon as it becomes clear that Nathan cannot be dissuaded from attending, even though he has no role in the wedding party to rehearse. 

“It is my sworn duty, as your best, oldest, and only friend, to be here for you on this momentous occasion,” he tells Kelly.

“No, it’s your duty to piss off so you don’t fuck up my wedding rehearsal by being a dick,” Kelly says, but Nathan only chuckles indulgently and puts a finger to Kelly’s lips to shush her. Then he’s early to the rehearsal, during which he lounges in the pews and rates everyone’s wedding walk. Kelly gets an 8.5 — “always room for improvement!” — and Alisha a six. She flips him off and advises everyone else to do the same.

Given Simon’s newly displayed “cleaning up after Nathan” superpowers, Alisha is inclined to ask him for help. But he isn’t at the rehearsal. “He’s not doing anything in the ceremony,” Kelly says. “I asked him if he wanted to be an usher but he wouldn’t. Said he’d do whatever I wanted but nothing for Seth.”

Alisha stares blankly. “Why’s he pissed at Seth?” 

Kelly looks at her the way she normally looks at Nathan when he’s doing something inane. “Because Seth never told anyone you were immortal until after Simon went to off himself, obviously.”

“Oh.” Alisha supposes that it’s true that was a fucked-up thing for Seth to do, no matter how convincing all Kelly’s “when I was in an alternate Nazi timeline” stories are. He kept the loop going when he could have stopped it very easily. But she’s never felt particularly like carrying a grudge with him over it.

For one thing, she really doesn’t care enough about Seth to think about him long enough to get mad at him. He was passable enough drinking company that one night when Kelly and Simon bowed out early and she won her immortality off him, but mostly he seems boring to her. So he registers in her mind as far as he makes Kelly happy, and that’s it. 

And for another, Seth didn’t owe Alisha anything when he kept the loop going. He never looked her in the eye and promised her he wasn’t going to let anything bad happen to her.

A more immediately pressing question emerges. “But then who’s going to distract Nathan?” Alisha asks. 

Kelly looks grim. From the pews, Nathan has begun to sing very rude lyrics to the wedding march.

*

Alisha: Hey I need your help, Nathan’s being a prick. You hang out with him all the time now, how do I get him under control?  
Alisha: The vicar’s crying, Curtis already had to call in two family favors to get him to stay  
Alisha: Oh fuck now the organist is about to quit  
Alisha: What the fuck do we do to stop this? Curtis is saying violence but I think that only makes him stronger  
Alisha: Where the fuck are you anyway?  
Alisha: Now the flower girl is traumatized

Simon: Shit, sorry, I had my phone off.  
Simon: Did you try threatening to call Marnie? Or sometimes if you ply him with liquor it calms him down.

Alisha: It’s fine now. Kelly yelled him into submission  
Alisha: Seth bribed the organist and Curtis got his gran to call the vicar. Rudy tried to talk to the flower girl but now she’s with her mum and I think after enough therapy she’ll be all right  
Alisha: Where are you?

Simon: My parents’ house.

Alisha: Why’s your phone off?

Simon: Work stuff.

Alisha: Thought you took the week off

Simon: I did.  
Simon: There was an emergency. It’s fine, I took care of it.

Alisha: I don’t know why you keep thinking I can’t tell when you lie to me  
Alisha: Whatever. If you don’t want to tell me, don’t

Simon: I’m sorry. That was stupid, I shouldn’t have.  
Simon: I’ll tell you when I see you tonight. Promise.

Alisha: You better

*

Alisha goes back to her flat after the rehearsal to dress for dinner with a certain amount of trepidation. 

You’re allowed to be sluttier for a rehearsal dinner than for a wedding itself, so she’s wearing one of her littler dresses. It’s silvery blue leopard print, slinky and short, and she’s piling silver necklaces on top and silver bracelets on her wrists. She puts on her dress and her jewelry, and she pins her hair back from her face, and she breaks out her best red lipstick and her silvery blue eyeshadow and the heavy black liquid eyeliner that’s best for a cat’s eye, and the whole time she’s thinking about what’s going to happen at this party.

She’s on the verge of something with Simon, plainly. After she held his hand last night he just called her a cab and saw her home, but something’s about to give there any moment. And she’s managed to forestall discussion of Richard so far, but when he’s not at the party tonight it will become very obvious that she’s not with him anymore. So they won’t even have the flimsy barrier of her hypothetical boyfriend to forestall whatever’s about to happen.

Does she want something to happen with Simon? What does she want from him? 

She doesn’t want a fling from him, definitely. There’s too much history there, too much weight. Even if she met him for the first time now she wouldn’t particularly want a fling from him, however fit and good at flirting he’s gotten. He takes her so seriously. It wouldn’t be fun and easy to discard him at the end. 

If she wants a relationship from him, he’s currently living on another continent. And she knows she doesn’t want a long-distance relationship. She’s done the no-touching thing enough for one lifetime. 

She could tell him she wants him to take that job in London and move here, and he would do it, probably, because she asked him to. But she doesn’t want to ask him. She doesn’t want to be responsible for Simon changing his whole life again. She doesn’t want to feel like he’s building his whole life around her again. He did it before, and it was too much then, and then look what happened. The worst thing happened.

Has she forgiven him for that? 

He understands how fucked up it was. He’s working on making sure he never does anything like it again. And she still likes spending time with him more than anyone else she’s ever met.

But it was so terrible. He tried to stick her in a freezer; he tried to stick himself in there with her; he told her he was saving her life while he did it; he made her fall in love with him while he did it; it was such an awful thing to do and it hurt her so badly. 

What if she can never forget it? What if she tries to get back together with him but she can’t forgive him, and then it just eats away at her every day until all the ways she loves him disappear, because her anger at what he did swallows her up the way his self-hatred swallowed him up before?

Alisha doesn’t know. She doesn’t know. 

She hates the thought of Simon hating himself that much. 

And he still lies to her all the time. It’s amazing how he can always be so sincere with her but also such a liar. But that part bothers her less, actually; that’s the sort of thing weird little freaks like Simon always do. And he’ll always be a weird little freak, no matter what happens.

She thinks about _I want to get out of your way_ and _I loved you both times_ and _You’ve always been good at that sort of thing_ and goose pimples dance up and down her spine.

*

The rehearsal dinner venue is one of Alisha’s contributions to the wedding. One of her old clients owns a restaurant in the middle of the estate, and he does them a discount on the fee for the venue. “Professional courtesy,” he tells her, and Alisha thinks smugly, _That’s right. Professional._

When she gets there Kelly’s looking regal in a black sheath, with her ponytail even more slicked back than usual. “Alisha! Have some champagne, yeah?” she says. “It’s proper class.” 

Alisha takes a flute for herself, feeling impressed. She hadn’t known Seth would be willing to splash out like this, but then she supposes he does have all that drug dealing money to burn. “Happy wedding rehearsal,” she says, and clinks her glass against Kelly’s. “Are you nervous?”

“Nope,” says Kelly peacefully. “I made Nathan promise not to say anything tomorrow, and other than that it’s all coming together exactly the way it’s supposed to. And when it’s over tomorrow, I know I’ll have what I want.”

“And then you’re going back to _Uganda_ ,” Alisha says. “Abandoning me. You can’t have what you want here in London with me and Curtis and Rudy?” 

“Not unless there are landmines I can disarm here,” Kelly says. “It’s different for you. You can use your power to help people everywhere, but where can I use rockets for good?”

“NASA,” Alisha offers.

“How would that be closer to you here?” Kelly asks.

“I’m just _saying_ , you’ve got _options_ ,” Alisha says, annoyed. 

Kelly slings an arm around her and kisses her cheek. “You come and see me in Uganda anytime you get sick of things here,” she says. “There’s always people to find where I’ve been staying.” 

Then Seth comes over to drag Kelly away to say hello to his rugby mates. So Alisha wanders over to where Rudy and Jess are sniggering at a table by themselves and joins them for awhile in speculating about the sex lives of all the other guests. When Curtis finds them he looks judgmental, and Alisha starts to worry he’ll peel Jess away from the fun and form a team of self-righteousness against Alisha and Rudy’s honest smutty gossip. But then he recognizes one of Kelly’s uncles from his dad’s bingo team and starts dishing out scandalous gossip of his own. Apparently the bloke has a thing for women with hearing aids because they can’t always tell how loud they’re getting in bed. Alisha is enthralled.

Eventually, though, Rudy and Jess start to fade away to nuzzle each other in the corner, and Curtis starts chatting up one of the waitresses who works on the restaurant staff, and Alisha finds herself alone again. And that’s when she sees Simon.

He’s standing by himself, just watching her. He’s maybe been watching her for a while, that creep. His eyes are very soft and warm on her.

He’s standing with his shoulders straight, spine relaxed. His shirt has the right number of buttons undone at the collar, and his hair is the right amount of messy. Most people would never know, looking at him now, just how weird he’s always been. But Alisha does, and she feels something in her chest curl tenderly around the knowledge of his secret weirdness.

She picks up a spare champagne flute and walks over to meet him. “Hey,” she says. “Have some champagne.”

“I don’t think it’s actually champagne,” Simon says, accepting the flute. “I think it’s just sparkling wine.”

“Stop being a pretentious prick and drink it,” Alisha orders him, and he laughs and does what she says. “So what shadowy secret mission were you running today, mystery man?” she asks. “And don’t be an arsehole and try to tell me it’s a work thing again.”

“Well, it was, actually, in a way,” he says. “I told that charity firm that I was going to take the job they offered me. I had my phone off while I was at their offices signing the contract.”

Something’s happening to her face. She’s smiling without being able to control it _at all_ , and oh shit, she can feel her eyes crinkling at the edges, she’s smiling so hard. “So you’re staying, then?” she says.

“Alisha,” Simon says very earnestly, “if you want me not to take it, you can tell me, all right? I’ll go back to California and it will be fine. I can find another job there.”

“Do you want this job?” she asks.

He takes a deep breath. “I think I do, yeah. I think this is the sort of thing I want to do. And I don’t think I want to be in America forever. But that doesn’t mean I have to come back here. Not if it will make things hard for you.”

“Then you should stop being such a fucking martyr and let me congratulate you,” Alisha says. That startles him into a real smile and oh fuck, oh fuck. She likes him so much. She likes him so much, and he’s not doing this for her, he’s doing this for him, he’s building a life for himself and he’s not building it around her. “I’m really pleased you found this,” she says. And then, because it’s a separate thing, “I’m really pleased you’re staying.”

She is. She’s happy. 

_Yes_ , Alisha thinks. There is a question that she’s been asking herself, and the answer is yes.

Simon is just sort of gazing at her at this point, and she knows this look. This is how he looks at her when he is just about to kiss her, when his eyes get cloudy and drift down to her lips before he drags them back up to her eyes. Her heart pounds in her ears, and chills chase each other up and down her spine.

But this time, instead of kissing her, he takes a step back away from her. And then he just says, “Thank you,” in a business-like voice.

_What the fuck_ , Alisha thinks, and opens her mouth to say it. But she’s interrupted by Rudy, of all people, shouting, “Simon? Simon! There’s the little cunt!” and sprinting over like Simon’s the ice cream man. 

Then Rudy’s going on and on about how well his cock has been doing since Simon saved it, which Simon gravely says he is happy to hear, and Alisha vainly struggles to get a grasp on what exactly the fuck Simon think he’s doing. She’s outright glaring at him at this point, but he is carefully keeping his eyes away from her, listening to Rudy’s soliloquy on the adventures of his cock as though it’s fascinating. 

Frankly it’s unnerving when Simon won’t stare at her, because staring is truly his favorite hobby. And she can’t glare at Rudy to get him away from Simon, because Rudy is incapable of taking a hint. Where is Jess when Alisha needs her? Probably off with Curtis somewhere, judging the world, instead of judging her boyfriend like she should be.

In disgust Alisha stalks away to find something stronger than champagne. Or _sparkling wine_ , if you are pretentious.

Seth has not splashed out on an open bar, just flutes of sparkling non-champagne, which is stingy in Alisha’s opinion. She is reversing her opinion on his willingness to burn his drug dealing money dramatically in light of this news. But the owner lets her into the back where he keeps the liquor anyway, “since it’s you,” he says. She emerges with a tumbler full of vodka and a resolution to drink until this night starts making sense to her again.

“Oh thank fuck, you found the good stuff,” says Nathan in her ear, because of course this night is just going to keep getting worse for her. “Give it here,” he says, and wordlessly she passes him her drink and lets him take a swig. Even though god only knows what’s been in Nathan’s mouth recently.

“Figured you’d be off torturing Barry some more, not drinking in the corner by yourself,” he notes, passing the glass back to her. “That act starting to get a little old for you?”

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?” Alisha demands.

Nathan raises his eyebrows. “You know, this whole elaborate dance you two have going,” he says, “where you reel him in with your heaving bosoms and your willingness to pretend like he’s not the shortest man who ever failed to qualify as an Olympic gymnast, and then you cut him loose and go back home to shag your maths genius boyfriend while you cackle like a witch about how you’re never going to let Barry move on from you.”

Well, there are quite a few things going on in that scenario. “What exactly did Simon say to you?” Alisha asks.

“Oh, the goddamn usual,” Nathan said. “Blah blah blah you two had such a good talk, blah blah blah he fucked up, blah blah blah he needs to stop pining over you when you’ve got a boyfriend and you’re obviously over him but how can he when you’re so blah blah blah. I stopped listening the third time through, he’s honestly extremely boring whenever your name comes up.”

Oh, fuck, Richard. Shit, she forgot all about that. Still: an easy enough fix.

“Listen, you might think you can keep toying with him indefinitely just because he’s the size of a very buff midget and you knew him back when he had that pedo haircut,” Nathan goes on, pointing an accusing finger at her, “but he is actually an item in high demand back in America. The accent over there is worth about an extra foot in height, and they’re used to the strange staring on account of how the whole country’s filled with freaks like the Facebook kid and the guy with the electric cars and the hair plugs. He’s knee-deep in pussy every time he walks outside. He’s not going to keep sniffing after you forever, you know.”

Simon’s certainly been practicing his game on _someone_. Well, it’s not like she’s been a nun. 

“It’s sweet you’re concerned,” Alisha says, “but actually right now he’s having a meaningful conversation with _your_ replacement.”

Nathan draws himself up. “I beg your pardon? I have no replacements. I am irreplaceable.”

She points to where Rudy is still monologuing in Simon’s general direction, and Nathan’s jaw drops in outrage. “That fucking tattooed string bean of a motherfucker,” he mutters, and strides purposefully towards them.

Given Nathan’s bizarre talent for insults and Rudy’s utter inability to handle being insulted, Alisha fully expects this encounter to end with Rudy Two sobbing on Jess’s comforting shoulder. Judging from Simon’s slowly panicking face as he sees Nathan walking towards them, he expects something along the same lines. Alisha feels a little bad about the prospect, but she would feel a hell of a lot worse if Rudy One hadn’t just cockblocked her so effectively. She sips vindictively at her vodka.

But somehow within two minutes of Nathan reaching Rudy, the pair of them are both laughing uproariously and throwing their arms around each other like long-lost brothers. In a way it’s worse than the scenario Alisha had been imagining, because fuck, now there’s two of them, but on the other hand it does leave Simon free. Alisha gets ready to sidle back over.

“Alisha!” It’s Kelly, a few glasses of champagne the worse for wear, her sleek ponytail going a bit askew. 

Alisha loves Kelly very deeply and would cheerfully murder for her, but now is not the time. 

“Alisha, it’s time for your bridesmaid gift!”

Alisha perks up a bit. Perhaps she can delay her seducing Simon plan until after a present.

For a bridesmaid gift Kelly gives Alisha new gold hoop earrings. “They’re real silver,” Kelly tells her, “with real gold plate, because you fucking deserve it, mate.”

“ _Kelly_ ,” Alisha says, and throws her arms around her, because they really are the nicest earrings she’s ever owned. 

“You’re my best mate in the whole fucking world,” Kelly says, weeping. 

“And you’re mine,” Alisha says, starting to tear up herself. She’s not even that drunk, she just really loves Kelly.

Seth finds them then, looking haggard. “How much champagne has she had?” he demands of Alisha. “We’ve got a big day tomorrow,” he tells Kelly. “You’ve got to be ready.”

“Seth!” says Kelly. “You’re my best mate in the whole fucking world.”

“Wow,” says Alisha, and stalks off to leave them to it. She does make sure she takes the earrings with her, though.

Simon is with Jess now, listening intently as she talks about something that sounds serious. “And when I lost it,” Jess is saying, “I felt so fucking relieved. But I felt guilty too, you know? Because the other me was sure I should have it, and I went through so much shit to get it.”

Simon shakes his head. “I don’t see any way to be sure that it would even have been the same baby as the one the other you had in the alternate timeline. Time travel’s tricky that way —” He sees Alisha and breaks off abruptly.

“And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about time travel, it’s to _never_ believe what the other you says, unless they are guaranteeing you really good sex,” Alisha says, smiling brightly.

“Oh, quite the opposite,” Jess says.

“Then you’re safe,” Alisha assures her. She turns to Simon. “Hey. I’ve got to talk to you.” 

His face is guarded, but he says, “All right,” so she grabs his hand and pulls him out of the crowded noisy restaurant and into the street outside. 

His hand is warm and rough in hers. It’s from all those backflips on uneven rooftop tiles. When they first started dating his hands were smoother, Alisha is pretty sure, but by the time she could touch him he’d already developed callouses from parkour. His fingers always stayed long and elegant, though, every time she knew him.

“Is everything all right?” he asks her, when they reach the quiet of the street. “And did you have to set Nathan on Rudy like that? It was really even odds that would have ended in bloodshed.”

“D’you think?” Alisha tilts her head to the side. “I was thinking tears.”

“I don’t think Kelly wanted either at her rehearsal dinner,” Simon says. “It’s pure luck we avoided both.”

“Give it time,” Alisha says. “Nathan hasn’t talked to Jess yet.”

“And if we’re careful, he _never will_ , because she’ll skin him alive,” Simon says, very earnestly.

“Oh for fuck’s sake, I didn’t drag you out here to talk about Nathan,” Alisha says. 

“Then what?” he asks.

“I just wanted you to know,” Alisha says. And then she stops, because she can’t bring herself to just come right out and say it. Not right now, not with the heat and smell of this crowded restaurant still seeping out into the air around them, not while he’s watching her with exasperation and worry bickering behind his eyes.

He’s still holding her hand.

“Alisha,” he says. “Wanted me to know what?”

She tosses her hair and smiles up at him. Her killer smile, the one she always uses to close the deal. “Would you like to see my film noir fairy lights?” she asks.


	13. Chapter 13

She sneaks him into her building like she’s a teen with a strict mum and she’s breaking curfew, walking on tiptoe and and sticking to the shadows. Even though she’s an adult with a key and is free to come and go as she pleases, and she rarely bothered to sneak back when she actually did have a curfew. It feels like this should be clandestine. 

But she’s a little sheepish by the time she gets him up to her office and has plugged in the fairy lights, bathing the shabby little room in their glow. “See?” she says. “I told you it’s just an office.”

Simon is engrossed in looking around the room at her things: the heavy ugly desk she turned up for cheap online and spray painted pink; the little vintage lavender chair on her side of the desk and the mismatched blue one on the other side for visitors; the rattly old filing cabinet she shoved into a corner she can’t see from her desk, because she doesn’t see how to make a filing cabinet pretty. He runs the tip of one finger across the fake silk flowers she keeps in a vase on her desk, smiling faintly, and Alisha tries not to fixate on his hands as she perches on the edge of her desk and watches him look.

“I’ve never seen you with a space all your own before,” he remarks. “It’s nice. It suits you.”

“It’s messy, you mean,” she says. There are files strewn about on every available surface, but the order makes sense to her. “Is it enough of a detective’s office for you?” 

“Of course it is. It’s your office, and you’re a detective.”

“It’s really not very film noir, though.”

“Have you ever actually seen a film noir?” There’s a laugh in Simon’s voice as he wanders from her desk over to the window. The window does not have slatted blinds, but it does have sheer white curtains with pink flowers splashed across them.

“No, of course I haven’t, Simon, I’ve got a life,” Alisha says, annoyed, and he laughs outright and starts to go through the photos she’s got balanced on the windowsill. 

“I won’t tell Curtis you said that,” he says. “He’s been texting me a lot about Lauren Bacall.” 

“Is that the girl from the coffee shop? I thought her name was Fiona.” Alisha’s a little distracted, focusing on the photos he’s rifling through. It’s dark, aside from the fairy lights, but she knows what he’ll see as he lands on each one. 

One of the whole group the night their first round of community service ended, clustered around a filthy bar table and grimacing like young offenders. A selfie of her and Kelly, back during community service, in orange jumpsuits and holding trash-pickers, both flipping off the camera. One of her with Curtis, laughing and drunk at a club. A picture of her with her parents on either side of her at a street fair, both of them beaming at the camera and her looking smug. One of her raising her eyebrows skeptically at the camera and holding up the Daniels Detective Agency sign from her door, taken the day the sign was painted.

“No,” says Simon, his voice still warm with laughter and with something else. “That’s an actress. But I think Curtis thinks Fiona looks like Lauren —” He cuts himself off and she knows he’s seen the sixth photo.

It’s a photo of them. Not the Vegas photo. She left that one in their old flat. This one she dug out of a folder on her phone, sometime after they started talking again, and had printed.

It’s a photo Kelly took of them very early on in their relationship. Before they could touch each other. Before they’d moved in together. Maybe before they’d ever held hands through gloves. 

Neither of them knew Kelly was taking it when she did, so neither of them are looking at the camera. Instead she’s caught them standing in profile at that bar where Alisha and Curtis used to work, Alisha behind the bar and Simon on the other side, heads very close but not touching, intent in conversation. 

In the picture, Simon’s got his collar done all the way up and his fringe plastered down to his forehead. His hands are shoved in his pockets, as if he is determined not to offer himself the slightest opportunity to reach across the bar and touch Alisha. But he’s watching with open pleasure in his face as Alisha says whatever it is she’s saying in the picture, and she is laughing up at him as she wipes a glass clean, delighted with both of them in that moment.

“Oh,” says Simon now.

She can’t read the intonation of his voice, and it’s too dark for her to see his face. She half wants to turn on her desk lamp, just to give herself something to go on here. But she doesn’t want bright lights in this space just now, doesn’t want anything harsh and glaring. The moment’s too delicate to bear that.

After a long moment Simon puts the photos back down on the windowsill. “Have you got one of Richard?” he asks, voice a little strained. “I’m surprised I haven’t met him already. Was he there tonight?”

“Richard and I split up ages ago,” Alisha says.

In the dark she can see that he’s standing very still now. “Oh,” he says again. 

“Anyway I wouldn’t have a picture of him there if we were still together,” she says. “That’s where I keep pictures of what’s most important to me, and I never felt about him like that.”

“The group is important to you,” he says.

“The group is, yeah,” she says. “And what you and I have, that’s important to me. You’re important to me. You matter.”

“Alisha,” he says, and takes an unsteady breath in. 

“Anyway, that’s why I dragged you all the way up here,” she says. “I wanted you to know.”

At last he turns around to face her straight on. 

“Tell me what you want to happen now,” he says. Very simply. He’s always asking her that question, and she almost never knows the answer. But she does now.

“I want you to kiss me,” Alisha says.

He swallows. “And then what?”

Alisha raises her eyebrows. “I wouldn’t’ve thought this would be the time you’d go for dirty talk, but all right.”

“No,” he says, not laughing at all. “I mean will this be like before, last year. When we would do this and it would be like a relapse and then we wouldn’t even look at each other for days afterwards. Because I don’t think that’s something I can do again. I’ll do anything else, anything you ask me to do, but I don’t think I can do that.” 

“That’s not what I want from you.” Alisha gets up from the desk, walks over to meet him by the window. His breath is coming in fast and shallow, and his pupils have dilated so far that in the dark his eyes look nearly black. 

“Do you still want to be with me?” she says. She means it to be sultry, but instead it’s needy; her voice comes out near a whisper.

A car comes around the corner on the street outside and briefly the window is illuminated by its headlamps. In the passing light Simon’s eyes are helpless, transfixed. “You know I do,” he says. “I always do.” Their faces are very close together now.

“Good,” she says, “that’s what I want,” and she goes up on her toes and kisses him.

He makes a broken sound in the back of his throat. His hands come up to her face, one cradling her jaw, the other pushing back her hair, and he opens his mouth and lets her sweep her tongue against his.

Alisha surges up against him. Wraps her arms around his neck, pulls him close, closer. She meant this to be sweet, but the heat of relief licks through her as she kisses him, fast and consuming, and then she can only think that they need to be closer as she clings to him and devours his mouth.

And he knows, the way he always knows, because he’s dragging his hands down from her face and over her bare shoulders to wrap around her waist, pulling her tight against him. His mouth leaves hers but only to trail kisses down her neck, skimming over her necklaces, and then he pauses as he reaches her collar bone and she gasps for air. His nose nudges against her neck as he traces his lips very lightly over the thin and sensitive skin there, just above her clavicle. Looking for something. 

Alisha waits with goose pimples chasing each other up and down her spine, hands buried in his hair now. At last he brushes his lips over just the right spot and she shudders, and he makes an approving noise and opens his mouth and kisses her there again, more firmly, more wetly.

“Yes,” she breathes, and tries to pull him even closer.

He scrapes his teeth against that spot and she hears herself cry out, and then she hauls his head back up, kissing him hard, and pushes him back until his knees hit the back of her desk.

“Here?” He sits obediently down on the top of the desk, and his hands don’t leave her body as she clambers into his lap, struggling with her tight skirt and her high heels.

“I don’t want to wait,” she says, starting on the buttons of his shirt. “Do you? I don’t want to wait.”

“So fucking beautiful,” he says, which she figures is probably a no, and he kisses her and pulls down the zipper of her dress.

Then his hands are on the bare skin of her back, which is better, but she hasn’t gotten him out of his shirt yet, which is unfair. She starts laughing against his mouth as she pushes the sleeves off his arms, a little hysterical. 

“What?” he whispers, kissing her, a contagious smile pulling at his own lips. “What?”

“Nothing,” she says, “I just —” She breaks off to kiss him deeply, pressing herself against his bare chest, feeling him shiver against her. When she ends the kiss and rolls her forehead against his she’s smiling helplessly. “I’m really pleased you’re staying,” she says.

“So am I,” he says, and tilts his head up to steal a kiss from her before she realizes what he’s doing. Unfair, she thinks again; all those parkour-trained superhero reflexes. The PI world didn’t prepare her for this.

“Knew I should have got a fedora,” she murmurs into his mouth as she trails her fingers down to his belt buckle, and she feels him laugh in surprise more than she hears it. 

“Wait,” he says, pulling her hands away from his belt, kissing her fingers.

“We just said no waiting,” she argues. And then, playing dirty, presses kisses to that spot on his jugular that undoes him, kicking off her shoes as she does so to get a head start.

“I know,” he says, unsteadily, “just let me — let me —” He’s distracted by her hands in his. “Your hands are always so pretty,” he says, and kisses them again.

“Yeah?” she says. “They’d look prettier wrapped around your —”

He flips her onto her back on the desk and she shrieks, dissolving into laughter, a stack of her files skidding to the ground. “Let me,” he says again, kissing her mouth, and eases her dress down over her wrists and ankles until it pools on the floor. Tugs on her hips until her legs and arse are dangling off the edge of the desk, slips his hands under her knickers and pulls them down, then drops to his knees on the ground, draping her legs over his shoulders.

“Oh,” says Alisha, voice reedy, “yeah, okay,” and threads her fingers through his hair.

He turns his head, kisses her thigh. “I think about this all the time,” he says. Drags his mouth up her thigh in a line of wet, open-mouthed kisses and makes a sound like relief as he finds her clit with his tongue.

Alisha gasps, arching below him. His mouth is hot and certain and hungry against her as he laps at her clit, not teasing her at all, even though he’s always liked to. She told him she didn’t want to wait, so he’s giving it to her right away, moving his tongue exactly how she wants. She sort of thought that maybe after all this time she was exaggerating in her memories about how good he was at this but she wasn’t, she really wasn’t, if anything she was underselling, and now his tongue is moving faster and he’s slipping one finger inside her.

“Simon,” she says, and he murmurs against her. His free hand is holding down her hips as they jerk desperately against him, and he draws tender little circles with his thumb against her hipbone as he strokes the index finger of his other hand in and out of her and licks and licks and licks at her clit.

Oh god, how did she do without this for so many months? It’s ridiculous; she should never have to go without Simon going down on her for more than a couple of days at a time — no, she decides, as he slips another finger inside of her, no, one day between sessions is plenty — and she likes him so much and the sounds he is making are like he is starving for her. Waves of heat, sweet and aching, are spiraling through her body.

It’s never like this with anyone else. And she’s been with plenty of blokes who have been talented and enthusiastic about using their tongues, so it’s not just that. It’s not even that she’s the one who taught him how to do this, so he knows exactly how she likes it, or that he practiced on her until he could read her body like an open book. Her beautiful obsessive freak.

It’s that she loves him, probably. And that he loves her. That’s what makes it feel like this.

He sucks her clit into his mouth and she sobs. One hand clutching his head, the other scrabbling for purchase on the edge of the desk. Her hips jerk frantically up and he pins them down again, so gently, and then the waves crest and overtake her and she is drowning in them, in him. 

After she comes down he kisses his way back up her body. Stops to unhook her bra, kiss her breasts, run his tongue across her nipples. Then she tugs him up by his hair and kisses his mouth, pulling him close as he stoops over her, propped up with both hands braced against the desk on either side of her.

“Hi,” she says, still a little dazed.

“Hi,” he says, kissing her sweetly. “I really missed that,” he confesses.

“Well, good thing I’m very noble and I’ll let you keep doing it,” she says.

“You’re really generous,” he agrees. “That must be why I missed you so much.”

“I missed you every fucking second,” she says, and his breath hitches and when he kisses her again it’s not sweet at all. She moans into his mouth, clinging to him, and wraps her legs around his waist. Tries to draw him as close as she can but he’s still got his trousers on.

“Why are you still …?” she whines, batting at his belt buckle, but she can’t get her fingers to work well enough to undo it.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” he says, pulling away from her just far enough to wrestle with it himself.

“The mouth on you,” she says, and he laughs with a giddy edge of hysteria to it, fingers weakening against his buckle.

It takes him awhile to get it undone, and she probably doesn’t make it faster by sitting up and draping herself over his torso and kissing his neck while his hands tremble at the waist of his trousers. He keeps sighing and arching into her, and then remembering what he’s supposed to be doing and leaning away again so he can focus more. She can’t help it: she has to keep touching him.

Finally he gets his trousers undone enough to pull them off in a messy bit of negotiation with his shoes, and then he’s bare in front of her. She does what she threatened and wraps her pretty hands around his cock, and he looks down at them there and says, “Oh _fuck_ ,” and kisses her roughly, teeth tugging at her lower lip.

“Come here,” she tells him when she can find enough breath to say it, and lays back on the desk, spreading her legs wider as he stands between them, and he stoops down over her to kiss her again. She guides him to her entrance, and just there, just on the brink of it, he pauses, shivering. He always wants to feel every moment so much.

“We’re going to do this again,” she says, drawing one leg up to drape it over his hips, “we’re going to do this so many times,” and he shivers again and pushes inside of her.

Alisha hisses slowly, feeling her body adjust around him. He holds himself still for a long moment, eyes wide and locked on hers, trembling a little where his arms are braced on either side of her. Then she brings up her other leg so that she can wrap them both around his waist, and he drives into her hard and fast.

“Jesus fucking _Christ_.” Alisha’s head falls back and her hips snap up. For a moment all her senses go cloudy and she is swamped with pleasure, and then it heightens and shifts and then everything comes back in overdrive, and she is hyper aware of the wood of the desk on her back, the muscles of Simon’s back shifting under her hands, the heat of him between her legs.

She can feel him panting above her as he thrusts urgently into her. She locks her ankles behind his arse for leverage so she can pull herself up, meeting his movements, and then the desk is creaking beneath them. 

He can’t seem to stop kissing her, even as frantically as he’s moving; keeps bending to kiss her breasts, her throat, open-mouthed and greedy. She feels as though her body will shatter if he keeps going but she’ll die if he doesn’t, and she clutches at his shoulders to keep from falling apart completely. Rakes her nails down his back, feels him writhe, and bites down on his earlobe. 

“God, Alisha,” he breathes. He kisses her mouth, a sloppy mess of a kiss, breathing hard through it. “So good, there’s no one like you, not anywhere, the way you feel,” he says, and she hears herself moan in response, urging him closer with her heels.

“Sweetheart,” she says, and he makes a helpless escalating noise that’s almost horrified, hips stuttering against hers. “Gonna make you feel so good. Gonna spoil you. You’re mine. You belong to me.” She’s rising up desperately to meet him, pushing him faster, faster.

“Yes,” he says, “fuck, yes, say that again.” 

“You belong to me,” she says. “You’re only mine.”

“Alisha. Yes.”

“You’re fucking me so good, you feel so good inside me. You’re mine, all mine.”

“Please. Please.” 

“I love doing this with you, I love fucking you, I love you.”

The noise he makes then is desperate, barely human. He tries to kiss her but he can’t quite pull himself together enough to do it, just presses his mouth clumsily next to hers. “Love you,” he breathes, “love you so much, so fucking much, Alisha. God. Fuck.”

“Simon,” she says, voice too high, and he knows what she needs without her having to say anything more, can hear it in her voice. Shifts his weight to one arm and brings the other one down between them, between her legs, and he is trembling against her still as he fucks into her but two fingers are firm and sure on her clit. 

She’s still so sensitive from before, and what they’re doing now is so overwhelming, it’s not going to take much direct contact to finish her off. Already she can feel pleasure rising up, about to engulf her.

“Yes, you’re so good,” she says, “doing so good for me, my darling, sweetheart,” and then it hits her and she can’t do anything but cling to his back and sob for breath as he drives into her.

When it passes he is still moving hard and fast into her, watching her with wide eyes. She feels wrung out and limp, barely capable of moving, but with an effort of will she keeps her legs up around his waist, giving him room, letting him do what he likes with her.

“You’re so beautiful,” he says. “So gorgeous, I’ve never seen anything like it, how beautiful you are.” 

“Show me,” she says, “show me how much you like it. Come for me. I want you to come for me, I want to feel it inside me. Show me. Show me that you’re mine.”

His eyes clench shut as if he’s in agony and his head drops to the crook of her neck. He thrusts into her once, twice, three times, and then he is shouting into her shoulder, jerking helplessly against her.

Alisha croons. Buries her hands in his hair, lets her legs at last fall limply down as he collapses on top of her, shaking. “Yes,” she says, “you did just what I wanted, just what I needed, you did it all exactly right.” She kisses his ear, the only part of him she can reach, and his hands convulse around her waist.

At last he seems to gather enough energy to lift himself off her and fall heavily back into her desk chair. “No, don’t go away,” she says, and he scoops her off the desk and into his lap, and she winds her arms around his neck and curls up against him.

“We’re going to ruin all your nice furniture,” he says, voice shaky. 

“Please don’t talk about office furniture right now,” she says. “I’m trying to enjoy the afterglow here.”

“And all this time I thought you asked me up here just so I could admire your office decor,” he says. “I feel used now.”

“You love it,” she says, and kisses his shoulder, and his arms go tighter around her waist before one hand drifts up to toy with her hair.

“Do we stay here all night?” he asks dreamily, wrapping one of her curls around his finger. “That actually would be extremely film noir. They’re always spending the night in their office.”

“Mmm, no,” she says, making up her mind. “I’m really not very film noir at all. I’m taking you home.”


	14. Chapter 14

Against all odds, Kelly’s wedding to Seth runs smooth as silk. 

“Why is it against the odds?” Kelly asks Alisha once they’re far enough into the reception that Alisha can say so without jinxing it all. “We’ve all worked our arses off setting everything up.”

“Well, with Nathan here,” says Alisha, and Kelly nods thoughtfully.

But it does all go smoothly. Kelly shimmers down the aisle on her mum’s arm in her sequined gown, and Seth tries and fails not to stare at her tits once she reaches the altar. (Alisha takes that as a compliment to her consulting work on the right sort of bra for this gown. Kelly’s tits do look truly magnificent.) They say their vows and exchange their rings, and they both cry a little in the right places. 

After the ceremony they all pack themselves into cars to drive to the community center for the reception, and it actually does look halfway decent, somehow. All those balloons Seth bought pack the ceiling so densely you can barely see those sad fluorescent tiles, the flowers from Seth’s old client cover up the unburied probation worker smell, and thanks to Alisha’s bribe/tip the DJ’s got decent music going before they even get there. 

Alisha does have a small heart attack when she sees Nathan handing the DJ a ten pound note and heading for the microphone during the toast portion of the reception. “Simon,” she hisses, “he’s counter-bribing. You’ve got to do something.”

“It’s fine,” says Simon, with what Alisha feels to be unwarranted calm, as he keeps tucking away at his wedding reception chicken. “He’s not going to do anything that would actually upset Kelly, not tonight.”

Alisha stares at him with horror, and then turns to Curtis, who is the only other person who appears to understand the gravity of the situation. 

“Should I tackle him?” he asks her in an undertone.

“We can’t have a brawl at a wedding!” she snaps back.

But before she can come up with any solutions Nathan takes the mic, and then out of absolutely nowhere he delivers a heartfelt speech about how amazing Kelly is and how important marriage is that has Alisha weeping into the handkerchief Simon passes her. 

“What the fuck,” she remarks, dabbing carefully at her face to avoid smudging her eyeliner. “Just: what the fuck.”

“He does that sometimes,” Simon says, patting her shoulder soothingly. “That’s why we keep him around.” 

Simon is not actually supposed to be sitting next to her. He and Nathan are supposed to be off at a table for the out-of-towners, but Alisha exercises bridesmaid privileges and moves his setting up to the bridal party table with her. Kelly raises an eyebrow when she sees this move, and Alisha just grins and promises to fill in the details later.

She can’t tell Kelly everything today because it’s Kelly’s wedding, but she finally has a good sex story to tell for the first time in a while and she’s longing to share it. Luckily, Curtis isn’t getting married. 

“Looks like you had a late one,” he remarks knowingly when he meets her before the ceremony in the vestibule. Kelly’s niece is tossing her flower girl basket about at the other end of the church, out of earshot, and Alisha’s yawning into her bridesmaid bouquet.

“I fucked Simon on my office desk last night,” she says. “It was fucking incredible.”

“Oh, man, I don’t need details,” Curtis says, grimacing. 

“They’re really good, though,” Alisha assures him. 

Curtis rolls his eyes. “So are you two back together, then?” he says. “Or was it a one-off?”

Alisha feels herself smiling bigger than she should. Unfair, the way Simon always does that to her. “Yeah,” she says, “yeah, we’re back together. He’s got a job in London and he’s moving back.”

“I’m happy for you,” says Curtis, “and I don’t need to hear anything else about your sex life.”

“There’s this thing he does with his tongue that they should teach in schools,” she says, at which point Curtis just walks away from her. He can be really rude sometimes.

The problem is no one appreciates Alisha’s lengthy and obscene stories properly except for Simon, and since he is starring in this one she can’t really tell it back to him. Actually she probably could and he’d probably really like it; Alisha makes a mental note to try that out on him soon.

If she’s being completely honest, she’s having a little trouble just now considering subjects that aren’t Simon and all the ways she should touch him next. She’s not neglecting her bridesmaid duties or doing anything that might jeopardize Kelly’s wedding. But it’s a bit of a struggle.

After she took him home last night they were too tired to do anything but sleep. But that had its own kind of intensity: refamiliarizing herself with the way their bodies curl together as they sleep, relearning how to be that close and that vulnerable. 

It’s been a long time since they’ve done that, even longer than it’s been since they last had sex. They haven’t slept next to one another since before he went back. Or, she guesses, from his perspective, since before he died.

She wakes up early to find him kissing her throat, and when she opens her eyes he says, “Oh good,” and rolls her onto her back and settles with his head between her legs. Won’t stop until she’s shivered her way to two orgasms, and then only after she pounds on his shoulders and says, “For fuck’s sake, just get up here.” Then he comes up shaking with laughter and whispers into her shoulder, “You’re so cheerful first thing in the morning, it never fails,” as he slides inside her. 

They fuck in dreamy silence, easy and warm. Lay there afterwards clinging together, legs intertwined, her head on his chest and his arms tight around her waist. It’s very comfortable, and Alisha would be extremely happy to spend the entire day like that, drifting between sleep and sex, with periodic breaks for food. But in what she now recognizes as an act of extreme shortsightedness, she picked the night before her best friend’s wedding to make this reunion happen. She should have picked a bank holiday or something.

“Right,” she says at last, “you need to fuck off. I’ve got a bride to dress and I can’t do that if you’re distracting me.” 

“Do I distract you?” Simon sounds delighted.

“I’m not answering that question until after I’ve got Kelly safely married off and she can’t yell at me for ruining her wedding,” Alisha says, sitting up and rummaging through the sheets for the night shirt she lost in the morning’s earlier activities. 

Simon looks alarmed at the prospect of clothing coming back. “I’ll stay and make you coffee,” he offers, sitting up just far enough so that he can kiss the back of her neck. “That’ll be the opposite of distracting. You need coffee to help Kelly properly.” He runs his hand up the inside of her thigh.

“You think you’re so clever,” Alisha says, biting her lip.

She does let him make coffee, since after all he’s correct that she needs to be caffeinated to perform her bridesmaid duties. But then she sucks him off at her kitchen table, so it’s probably a wash, time management wise.

After she finally gets him out of her flat she doesn’t see him again until the ceremony, when she peeks away from Kelly and Seth long enough to find him in the pews. He’s sitting next to Nathan, mostly watching Kelly say her vows, but when Alisha glances at him his eyes lock immediately onto hers and then his whole face goes bright. 

At the reception, he comes up behind her too quietly for her to hear and surprises her with his hands on her back, which is the kind of creepy thing he would have done a long time ago, or maybe the kind of smooth thing he would have done when he was from the future. “Hi,” he says in her ear after she’s finished jumping up into the air, thumbs rubbing gently at the skin exposed by the low back of her gold bridesmaid gown. “I like your dress.”

She leans back against his hands. “I picked it out for you,” she says. He breathes in sharply at that, and for the rest of the night as they slip in and out of each other’s orbits — as Alisha dances with Kelly and gossips with Rudy and gets Curtis to talk shit about other famous athletes the way he only will on special occasions, and as Simon discusses time travel with Kelly and film noir with Curtis and something involving avocados and strippers with Nathan — he always seems to find his way to her side with his hand on her back, stroking at the skin there.

After Nathan’s toast Alisha leans into Simon’s side. One hand on his knee under the table, his arm around her with his hand on her back. “Do you think they still keep that storeroom unlocked?” she asks. 

“I think if they don’t they definitely still keep the locker rooms, toilets, showers, and probably the roof unlocked,” he says. 

“Well, look who’s got a checklist,” she teases. 

“I learned it from you,” he says gravely.

“Mmm, can’t go before they cut the cake,” Alisha decides. “It wouldn’t be fair to Kelly.”

“That’s probably in the wedding etiquette books,” Simon agrees.

Instead they sit and talk about that private detective’s exam, because Alisha’s decided she is going to sit for it after all, “unless the studying gets boring, which it probably will,” she tells Simon, at which he looks skeptical. “You’re definitely getting that license,” he says.

They talk about Simon’s new job, and what the best ways are to make rich people feel so guilty that they will want to give all their money to fight against malaria, and whether rich people are fond of thinking of themselves as superheroes too. (“But what would their superpower be?” asks Simon. “Money,” says Alisha, “and those ugly fucking tiny purses rich people like.”) 

They talk about whether the storm was aliens, which Alisha thinks it definitely wasn’t but Simon thinks is a strong possibility, and why Echo and the Bunnymen are so incredibly depressing, and whether Kelly and Seth are going to stay in Uganda forever or they’ll find themselves back in London with the rest of them eventually. They keep talking, and they don’t stop until Curtis and Nathan wind up back at their table, arguing vociferously about time travel.

“Right, Barry knows about these things,” Nathan says. “In the timeline where we all got famous, shouldn’t I have been able to save us all?”

“But Curtis saved us all,” Simon says. “He’s the one who rewound time. That’s what his power was.”

“Ha!” says Curtis with triumph.

“But I was immortal!” Nathan protests. “The cheese man couldn’t kill me! Curtis didn’t even need to have his cow phobia while I was around, I could have taken care of it all single-handedly.”

“ _He_ said you were all dead,” Curtis says, nodding at Simon. “I gotta assume that means you, too.”

“But I was _immortal_ ,” Nathan says again.

“And where was I for all this?” Alisha demands. “You’re turning back time and Simon is running about dramatically revealing everyone’s dead, and what do I get to do in this timeline? I always thought I’d be _great_ at being famous. Was I at least doing shitloads of coke?”

“Nah, you said being famous was boring,” Curtis says. “Which being famous for having superpowers really was, it was way worse than when I was famous for running. We were just stuck in that hotel with groupies and gift baskets, mostly. And then you and Kelly got kidnapped, and the milk guy sent the ransom note to Simon.”

Nathan narrows his eyes at them. “Hang on, though, that’s before you two started getting all googley-eyed at each other. I know, because I clearly recall seeing the beautiful girl trying to eye-fuck the weird kid and thinking, _Well, something’s not right with this picture_ —”

“Thanks,” says Simon.

“— and that was when I was wearing my Autumn Andy costume with the leaf hat, because the leaf kept blowing into your line of sight and disrupting the eye fucking.” Nathan demonstrates the leaf wafting into Alisha’s field of vision, and she slaps him away from her. 

“You looked like such a fucking twat in that hat,” she says.

“Just in that hat?” Curtis says.

“And I didn’t get that job until after community service ended!” Nathan concludes. “But the milk guy was during community service.”

Curtis shrugs. “The ransom note went straight to him, anyway, I think because he was the last person she texted. Maybe they got together earlier in that timeline and that’s what they were texting about.”

“Barry, you sly fox,” Nathan says. “Seducing wayward women with the power of milk and fame.”

“I wasn’t famous in that timeline,” Simon says. “I went underground.”

Curtis looks skeptical. “You were hanging about a lot for someone going underground.”

“That’s when the seducing was happening,” Nathan says sagely.

“Obviously I seduced him,” Alisha says. “That must have been what I was busy doing instead of shitloads of coke.”

Simon, taking her hand and interlacing their fingers, looks touched by the thought of this scenario. She beams at him.

“Right, so if you lot were off busy having weird milk sex —”

“Fuck’s sake,” Alisha says.

“— I should have been the one to save us all that time around,” Nathan says definitively. 

“When did you ever save us, even in a timeline that got erased?” Curtis says. “You were always too busy being a prick, weren’t you?”

Nathan gapes. “Never, in all my years, have I been so insulted —”

“He did Rachel’s cult,” Simon contributes.

Curtis sniffs. “Right, so one time.”

“I am a fucking _hero,_ and a _father,_ and if my _son_ could hear you just now,” Nathan begins.

“Right, you lot, stop talking about whatever you’re talking about,” Kelly says, swishing her mermaid gown back to the table, Seth in tow. “Nathan, I need you to break into that cupboard where they keep the good booze.”

Nathan leaps to his feet in horror. “Are we out of alcohol?”

“Not yet,” says Seth grimly. “But those little church ladies can drink.”

“If you’re having a wedding at the church you’ve got to ask them to the reception after, that’s the rule,” Curtis says, unrepentant.

“Have you still got a key?” Kelly asks Nathan. 

“No,” he says, “but luckily I stashed extras in secret hiding places all around the building, foreseeing just such an occasion as this. And there’s only fi — six possible places where they could be! No, seven!”

“Fuck’s sake,” says Seth, and he and Kelly each take one of Nathan’s arms and lead him away.

“Well this I’ve got to see,” says Curtis, and ambles after them, leaving Alisha and Simon sitting at the table alone.

“We should really help,” says Simon, making no move to get up.

“Fuck it, not like I can put myself in a key’s shoes,” Alisha reasons. He’s still holding onto her right hand on top of the table; underneath the table, she slips her left hand back onto his knee. 

“I think we did get together in that milk timeline,” he says. “And the Nazi timeline. And all the other ones.”

“I think we did, too,” she agrees. “But if this is the only timeline we get, that’s still okay. It’ll keep going.”

“Oi, Alisha!” Kelly calls back to the table. “You’re my fucking bridesmaid! And a detective! We need your help with this!”

“We need a superhero!” Nathan yells over her shoulder. “Save us, Barry!”

“Fuck’s sake,” says Alisha.

“We’re coming,” Simon says. 

“But after this I’m checking to see if that other storeroom’s still unlocked,” Alisha says.

They get up to go save their friends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap on the Refrigerator trilogy! Thanks so much for coming along for the ride, everyone.


End file.
